


A horse with no name

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, BAMF Narcissa Black Malfoy, Dark, Eventual Happy Ending, Family, Feminist Themes, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Love, Narcissa takes no prisoners, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29310402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Narcissa's Guide to Dark Lord Management.(the care and keeping of, in times of wars, prophecies, and pandemics.)
Relationships: Abraxas Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Abraxas Malfoy/Tom Riddle, Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Delphi & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Narcissa Black Malfoy & Harry Potter, Narcissa Black Malfoy & Voldemort
Series: Pandemic [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Comments: 12
Kudos: 43





	1. Little red rooster

**Author's Note:**

> Written from Narcissa's perspective.

  
**Home of the Blues**

_1961_

The overgrown bed of poppies in the little backyard was mown down by Noxy, the House Elf, leaving a naked patch of wet, red earth.

There was an awning, to shield the attendants from the incessant rain that had been pouring for the last three days. 

There they were, bustling about, speaking to each other in low voices, giving my father many condolences. 

_Oh, but she had been so young!_ they lamented. 

_No sons_ , they clucked. 

_A year of widower's mourning, and then a new wife_ , they advised. 

Hatted and veiled, they fluttered about the bier, while Noxy ferried about canapés and champagne, keeping them fed and watered. 

My stomach grumbled. 

A man on a wheelchair was speaking to my father, and the wistful sadness on his face made me wonder if he truly had come to mourn. Beside him, thin and quiet, stood a striking man, robed in summer's flax dyed black, plain among the others, wearing neither hat nor carrying a cane. 

He startled, and turned to look up at the edifice of the house, unerringly bringing his gaze to my window. Then he acted in a strange and obscene way, brushing his hand over the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, in a manner intimate and inappropriate. My father's lips tightened, and the guests were scowling at the breach of decorum. The man in the wheelchair tilted up his head with a warm smile, before returning to his conversation with my father, and the audience turned away to gossip of other matters.

I craned my neck and lifted to the tips of my toes to see more of that strange man. 

A knock sounded on my door. 

I turned abruptly, facing the spelled and bolted door of oak in surprise. Surely, my father would not have changed his mind! I swallowed as the door became translucent, and through the permeable barrier stepped the man from the garden. 

He was tall and thin. His hands were dainty, as my mother's had been. His face was striking, even if he did not have the strong features of many Pureblood wizards my father entertained. 

"Noxy will kill you," I whispered, wondering if I should shout for the House Elf, or for my father. 

"As she killed your mother?" The strange man asked. 

I stuffed a hand into my mouth, stifling my sobs. He stood watching me, awkward and surprised by my reaction, before a haunted cast touched his expression. 

Taking a deep breath, he stepped across the threshold of my prison, and made the door return to its form. 

"You are hungry. When did you eat?" he asked, as I began rocking myself, silent and trembling. 

Then he hesitated, and said, "You may cry. He cannot hear you."

"Noxy-"

"The House Elf will not hear you," he said quietly. 

I stared at him, bleary from tears, with a pounding headache from weeping and hunger. I had had to be quiet. 

I trusted him. 

So as they flitted about her coffin in the naked backyard stripped of her poppies, I sat on the frayed carpet below my barred window and wept for my mother, sobbing loud, with no heed to presentation or decorum or breeding.   
  
He watched me. 

A strange warmth seized me, clumsy and uncertain, and on my lap appeared dozens of poppy flowers. My mother's poppies. I cried again, desperate to have her back with me, even if all she had had done was to lie in her bed with a broken spine and beg my father to love his daughters three. She had read to me _The Tales of Beedle The Bard_ , whenever her health had allowed her to. 

I clutched the poppies in my tiny hands and hugged them to my chest. If I only I knew the preservation charms that Bella and Dromeda knew! I had my mother's wand. I could-

"Here, let me," the man said briskly, conjuring a beautiful earthen vase that he set beside my little cot, and filled with poppies. 

"They won't die?"

"Not until I die," he told me. 

"You must not die then," I whispered. 

He laughed, and his laughter was the first I had heard in this room. It was a mellow, musical thing, as butterflies dancing about poppies in the spring, warm and easy and sun-baked. 

"Abraxas is adept at this," he continued, chagrined. "You shall have to settle for me, nevertheless." 

"The man in the wheelchair." 

He smiled, and he was not smiling for me. He was smiling for that man in the wheelchair. I wished that someone would smile so because of me. My mother's smiles had been tainted by pain. My father had never smiled at his daughters. Bella's smiles were touched by fear each time she hugged me goodbye before going to Hogwarts. Dromeda had never smiled at any of us, desperate and determined as she had been to leave this house behind.

"Does he make you happy?" I asked curiously. 

"Unto my soul," he said, and the wry note of self-deprecation in his voice I liked very much. 

He came to kneel beside me and offered me a Chocolate Frog. 

"Noxy-"

"Trust me," he said softly, brushing my matted hair with a careful touch, as if he had not done that before and was experimenting what would best make me stop crying. 

My father had never touched me in kindness. I began weeping again, wishing that Bella was home to embrace me. 

"You are fraying the limits of my knowledge," my companion muttered, before Summoning me to him with a quick curl of his magic, perching me upon his lap sideways, and opening the Chocolate Frog for me. I took the card. 

"Do you know to read?" 

I shook my head, ashamed. 

"If you eat the chocolate, I shall read it to you." 

So I ate the chocolate, greedy and hungry and crying still, and he read to me.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE  
CURRENTLY HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS  
Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark Wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and ten-pin bowling.   
  


At the end, he laughed and shook his head. 

"I want to be like him," I admitted, licking the chocolate off my fingers and rubbing them clean on my frock. 

"Whyever would you want that?" 

"My father cannot kill me then."

"Your father will not kill you. You needn't discover your inner Albus Dumbledore for that." 

He was a very strange man, amused and sympathetic and uncertain in turns. My mother had not acted so. Aunt Walburga or Uncle Orion, when they had been allowed to visit, had not acted so. 

"Do you have children?" I asked skeptically. 

"Abraxas has a son," he said, as if that was an answer. 

"My name is Narcissa, but everyone calls me Cissy."

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Narcissa." 

"Well, what is your name?" I asked, exasperated. 

"What a demanding thing you are," he teased, offering me another Chocolate Frog. 

This one too had Albus Dumbledore on the card. And this time, when he read the lines to me, he took my right hand in his and showed me the letters and how they became words and sentences and meaning. 

I forgot about my mother and the backyard stripped of her poppies. I forgot about why Dromeda would never return home, and why Bella clung to me each time she wished me goodbye before her train to Hogwarts. 

"I don't like chamber music," I admitted, as we read together again and again the same card about Albus Dumbledore, until I was no longer stuttering over the words. 

My father played chamber music while he was in a particularly vicious mood. It boded nothing good in this house. 

"I cannot say I am overfond of chamber music," the man with no name said. His magic soared about me again, and conjured from the dust a strange, swan-necked instrument. 

"A gramophone," he explained. "It plays Muggle music." 

I frowned. 

He placed it on my cot, and fiddled with it. I watched him suspiciously. Muggle music? 

"My father won't be pleased."

The first strums emanated from the gramophone. It was music unlike anything I had heard in this house. It was lively and vibrant and sung by a man who was happy, even if he was singing of unhappy places. 

" _Just around the corner there's heartaches_  
_Down the street that loser is you_  
_If you can wade in through the teardrops,_  
_You'll find me at the home of the blues"_

"You'll find me at the home of the blues," I sung with that musician, trying to keep up. 

"I did find you at the home of the blues." 

"Why won't you tell me your name?" 

"You shall have to find it on a Chocolate Frog Card one day." 

"I don't believe you have a Chocolate Frog Card," I said confidently. He did not even know social decorum! 

"Ah, you have found me out."

I sighed, and told him, "It is all right. I will make a card for you, one day, when I am old enough."

"I shall look forward to it. For now, may I ask you for one of the cards? It is missing from my collection."

Oh, poor man! I gladly gave one of the Albus Dumbledores.

"One for you, and one for me."

* * *

**Little Red Rooster**

1965

Noxy clicked her fingers, and I fell back down the stairs. Scampering to my feet, I tried to drag myself to the nearest window, to jump out. My legs began burning. I screamed as my insides twisted.

And abruptly, as I lay dying, I clutched tight to the Chocolate Frog Card of Albus Dumbledore I had. 

A flash of green ended my agony. 

Then I remembered nothing. 

\---

When I woke again, I was in a clean bed, smelling of potions and soap. I tried to get up, only to hear a tutting sound. 

It was the man in the wheelchair. 

"Abraxas Malfoy," he introduced himself. "Welcome to my home, Miss Black."

Black was my father's name.

"Narcissa."  
  
"Narcissa, then," he said gently. 

"Is she awake?" A voice called out from another room down the corridor. 

"Come and see for yourself, Riddle." 

"You are terribly vexatious." 

"You spelled the Chocolate Frog Card!" I accused the man. 

It could only have been that! Oh, how sneaky! How had he known that I would not throw it away? How had he been confident that neither Noxy nor my father would suss it out? 

"Allow me to introduce myself," he said pleasantly, coming to stand beside my bed and run a wave of multi-colored spells over me. "My name is Voldemort." 

"I am afraid he can be a tad overwhelming," Abraxas Malfoy said, laughing, despite the pain-worn features of him. He had my mother's face, in how it wore deep ache even if he smiled. Was he ill too? 

"He gave me chocolate," I said softly. "I had not eaten for three days. At my mother's funeral." 

"Druella's daughters did not attend the funeral," Mr. Malfoy remembered, eyes widening in understanding. 

"I was in the room with the grilled windows," I explained.

Pity flashed across Mr. Malfoy's features, before he settled into calm once more, when Voldemort's hand came to his shoulder as it had at my mother's funeral. 

"You, my balm of then and now," Mr. Malfoy said gently, covering Voldemort's hand with his own. 

\----

"Should we send word to Walburga and Orion? They are her closest kin. Her eldest sister is missing. The middle child is still enrolled at Hogwarts."

Dinner was at a small table set in Mr. Malfoy's private dining quarters. Voldemort served us three from bowls of fine china, and I carefully paid attention to my bearing and silver. 

"Can't we keep her here? We have no lack for room." 

"Riddle, they think you Cygnus's murderer. If we keep the girl, they will think you a paedophile." 

"The girl killed Cygnus. I merely thwarted her dire fate of disembowelment by House Elf." 

"You rid the house of her magic." 

"She is ten, Abraxas. What is she going to do in Azkaban?"

"What are you going to do in Azkaban, pray tell?"

"Oh, but I live under your protection."

"Beloved, baffling, blessed blight of me," Mr. Malfoy declared, laughing, laughing as if he was the happiest man on this world then. 

"Write to Dumbledore," Voldemort said. "He will have found the truth of what happened, the bloodhound that he is. Tell him to send her letter early. She will be better off at Hogwarts."

"Write to Dumbledore?" Mr. Malfoy asked, amused. 

"Let us return to our earlier matter of discourse, where you were singing paeans to the blessed, beloved thing I am to you."

"You are that," Mr. Malfoy concurred. "You have also summarily kidnapped a ten-year-old girl who has disposed of her sadistic father with elan." 

"All in a day's work!" Voldemort exclaimed, laughing. He waved a hand and a gramophone began playing. 

_"I am the little red rooster_  
_Too lazy to crow for day!"_

"You are a little red rooster," Mr. Malfoy said dryly. "When have you woken before the dawn?"

"Sunrise is overrated."

"Oh, your abominable Americanisms!" 

"Heart's delight, you called me!" 

"Liver's bane, too," Mr. Malfoy teased, lifting his glass of wine to Voldemort. 

_"Watch out strange cat people_  
_Little red rooster's on the prowl"_

"How do you find the food, Narcissa?" Mr. Malfoy asked me. 

"I like the soup," I blurted out. 

"Cullen Skink," Voldemort explained. 

I blinked at him. 

"Skink means the hough of beef. When the poor people in northern Scotland were unable to find scraps of beef due to economic strains but had plenty of fish to cook with, and smoked haddock was found everywhere, meat stews transformed into fish-based soups, but the name skink stuck," Voldemort told me. "Cullen is a town in Scotland." 

"He is an excellent chef," Mr. Malfoy said quietly, smiling sweet at his friend. 

Afterwards, as I was led away by the House Elf from Mr. Malfoy's dining quarters, I overheard their conversation over the music.

 _If you see my little red rooster_  
_Please drive him home_  
_Ain't had no peace in the farm yard_  
_Since my little red rooster's been gone._

"I have missed you dearly," Mr. Malfoy said. 

"I have always returned to you." 

It was not Mr. Malfoy's private quarters, I realized. 

It was _their_ quarters. 

* * *


	2. Mr. Soul

**Mr. Soul**

_1967_

There was a mirror in an unused classroom on the Third Floor. I sat before it, every night, and yearned for what it showed me. 

"Miss Black." 

It was Dumbledore. In my nightgown's pocket was his Chocolate Frog Card, that I carried about. 

My good luck charm. 

"What do you see, I wonder?" he asked me politely. 

In the mirror, Cygnus had an arm about Druella. Dromeda and Bella were holding hands. And in my mother's arms, slight and loved, was a golden-haired girl.

"Why did Voldemort kill my parents?" I asked quietly. 

Dumbledore's eyes were full of sorrow. 

"Professor?"

"Ah, only that I remember Tom standing before this mirror many years ago, in 1940."

A boy he had taught? 

"What did he see?"

"A chocolate frog."

"A chocolate frog?" I asked, shocked, disbelieving that it would be anyone's desire. 

"He was hungry that night, I suspect."

Dumbledore seemed faraway and burdened. 

"May I ask what you see, Professor?"

Slytherins were not meant to be polite to Dumbledore. This was an unwritten rule in our house, wasn't it? 

"A hole in a soul turning whole."

I began to ask what he meant, when he tutted and said, "To bed with you, Miss Black." 

The mirror had been removed when I came the next night to see my family. 

\----

My summers were spent at Malfoy Manor, where Abraxas Malfoy lived in the company of his House Elves. Lucius, Abraxas's son, frequently travelled to Europe with Bella, leaving me alone in Wiltshire with his father.

Voldemort would flit in and out, and in the evenings, prepare exotic dishes from faraway lands and strive to portray himself nonchalant when Abraxas or I praised him for his culinary concoctions. 

"I merely followed a recipe!" he would insist, dismissive. 

"How did you learn?" I asked curiously. 

Pureblood children from wealth were not taught. What need had we to toil over a stove? There were House Elves for that. 

Was he a pureblood? 

Did he come from lesser circumstances? 

His decorum betrayed him often. Our society was a learned affair for him, not one he had grown up in.   
  
"At Hogwarts," he told me. "The House Elves taught me."

"Why?" I blurted out, before I could think twice. 

"It was something to do," he answered.

There was that flush to his throat; a tic of his whenever he lied. I frowned. He lied a great deal to me, I had come to notice. Abraxas suppressed his smile at my perusal of Voldemort with a sip of wine. 

"Mirth at my expense is unbecoming, Abraxas."

"Riddle," Abraxas said evenly, eyes glimmering in mischief. "Let us have our summer's music."

So we had our summer's music on the gramophone. _Mr. Soul_ , by Buffalo Springfield, began playing, lively and vibrant. 

_"Oh hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a reason,_  
_For the thought that I caught that my head is the event of the season!"_

"No," Voldemort said flatly. 

Abraxas raised an eyebrow, his good humor increasing with every verse sung. 

"Narcissa must learn to dance. What a pity that I cannot teach her!"

"We can afford an instructor, Abraxas."

"Then I cannot watch you dance for my pleasure, can I?" 

Voldemort broke into a helpless peal of laughter, and leaned across the table to brush a kiss to Abraxas's cheek. 

"Riddle," Abraxas said gently, cupping his chin and watching him with indescribable fondness. "The girl is not used to your lack of propriety." 

Bella and I had become used to Voldemort's lack of propriety. Lucius had explained to us that he was carried away despite himself in Abraxas's presence often. Lucius had not sounded offended. He had been seeing this from his childhood and was inured to it all. Bella, who was fond of Voldemort for having taken me in, did not care about his perversions. 

Perversions. 

I did not understand why Lucius and Bella referred to this proclivity of our guardians as perversion. 

The incandescence of affection that I saw did not seem perverse, any more than Chocolate Frogs could be called perverse. There was between them a softness I had not seen in any married wife and husband. 

"Go on, Narcissa," Abraxas encouraged me. "He shan't naysay me."

"The obscenity of your faith." 

"A man must have faith in sunrise and heart's song, Riddle." 

"I shall take your word for it." 

Abraxas burst into merry chuckles at that. 

_"Any girl in the world could have easily known me better_  
_She said you're strange but don't change and I let her_  
_In a while will the smile on my face turn to plaster"_

In the dim chandelier light, I saw the specks of waxen mottling that had stealthily crept onto Voldemort's skin. He was changing before my eyes, from flesh to plaster.

I let him guide me to stand upon his shoes. Wobbly, frightened, I caught his hands in a tight grip. 

"I shan't let you fall," he promised me. 

I scowled. 

He laughed, and his magic came to buffet me, slow and sure and steady, as treacle under winter's sun. Oh, his magic was changing too, as his skin. Where once it had been warmth and summer's grass and curling coils of woodsmoke, it had become this strange half-living thing, transitional, as burned sugar molasses under storm lightning, as a mix of matters that ought not to be mixed. 

" _Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster,_  
_For the race of my head and my face is moving much faster,_  
_Is it strange I should change, I don't know why don't you ask her?"_

"One, two, three, four," he taught me, twirling us about, again and again, as I followed him clumsy-footed. 

All was laughter and folly, as his magic caught me again and again, and he did not let me fall. 

He was changing under my gaze, magic and mind and flesh all, and as we danced to _Mr. Soul_ , premonition washed over me. 

Stricken, I turned to Abraxas, to find him watching Voldemort, as a man that mourned his heart. 

That night, restless, I walked in the gardens alone, and finally came to where the line of the ash trees broke at the flower beds curling to the house. There, I sat down and wept. 

Voldemort's magic, ever-present on the grounds and in the house, woke to my grief, and drawing of its potency, my emotion pulled forth hawthorn shrubs from the wet earth, thorny and of great strength, and heavy hung the fragrance of white hawthorn blossoms over my head.

Mayflowers, my mother had called them, for they heralded spring and the merry month of May. 

My grief, my fears, my magic soaked deep into the carpet of Voldemort's magic that lay soft upon these lands, and flowers mocked me with promises of another spring.   
  
\----

Bella had gone with Lucius to London. They partied and drank, and came back in the morning smelling of cannabis and alcohol and sex. Sex, Bella promised me, was the most marvelous discovery man had made. Her narratives made my insides squirmy and left me with nightmares. 

In those nightmares, Cygnus would strip me before a large ocean of faceless men and women. 

"There!" He would say, furious, pointing at my nakedness, at how plain and sexless I was. 

Bella would exclaim, horrified. My mother would weep, and ask Cygnus for forgiveness for having given him a useless daughter. And Dromeda would run away once more. 

In my dreams, Cygnus was a cruel man. 

\----- 

I was in the gardens, playing hopscotch by myself, when I first saw the blood on my frock and socks. 

Frightened, I ran to the house, up the stairs, to where Abraxas spent his mornings reading and doing his accounts. 

"No running in the house," he chided me, immersed in his book. 

I opened my mouth to speak, and only a half-choked wail of fear emerged. 

His book fell to the ground. He grabbed his wand and pressed it to the tattoo of the snake on his wrist. It glowed an iridescent green against the wood.

Abraxas's wand was of ash. Everyone knew that. Voldemort had saved Abraxas from the poliovirus in 1942. And then Hyperion Malfoy had planted an arboreal canopy of ash trees through the grounds of the Manor, to celebrate his son's miraculous survival. 

We watched each other, terrified, until we heard Voldemort clattering up the stairs as a madman possessed. His magic preceded him, disruptive and riotous and panicked, as it sought the source of worry.

"What is amiss?" He demanded, confused, when he finally arrived minutes after the swell of his magic. 

His eyes widened, when he took in the sight of me.

"Abraxas."

"Do something!" 

"You are turning out to be more inverted than Albus Dumbledore," Voldemort complained, coming to me, assessing me quickly with spell and eye. Then he said, sighing, "It is only the blossoming of your womanhood."

Abraxas choked, spluttering and laughing. 

"You used the same words as Slughorn," he explained, when Voldemort sent him a death glare. 

"Didn't Slughorn teach you about this?" he asked me, keeping his tone level. 

I had played truant, in Myrtle's bathroom. I had not wanted to hear about the birds and the bees, while girls and boys giggled and made eyes at each other, while I stayed there odd and broken, loatheful and loathing. 

"You had best do the honors," Abraxas said, summoning his book back to him. "Off with you."

"Abraxas, you have told me frequently that I have the emotional sensitivity of a tree."

"I am an inveterate homosexual, made thus by how enchanted I am by your many charms," Abraxas said gleefully. "Shoo! I have a book to read. Narcissa, dear child, you had best ask him to teach you the spells." 

Mortified, I ran out. A spell washed over me, stopping the flow of blood. 

"Don't cast magic on me willy-nilly!" I shouted at Voldemort.

"Then you had best ask your sister what to do," he said plainly. "I shan't have you trailing blood through the halls. Walburga shall call the Aurors." 

I scowled, and then relented when I saw the wretched confusion on his face, and when I saw him tentatively approach me despite his misgivings. 

He had come to me at my mother's funeral.

He had come to me when I had been dying. 

He had persuaded Abraxas to convince Dumbledore to send me an early letter of acceptance. 

He had signed my Hogsmeade permission slip. 

He had taught me to dance. 

"I don't want this," I said honestly, imploring. 

He had nothing to say. 

\--------

Miraculous, they had called Abraxas's escape from certain death. The only miracle was Voldemort's magic, haunting in its broken loveliness, as it embraced me still. 

"Professor McGonagall taught us in Transfiguration that our magic is our soul."

"They called her the finest of our generation, did you know?" he asked me, eyes fond in reminiscence. 

He spoke of Professor McGonagall affectionately, whenever her name popped up in conversations. 

"Why do you like her?" I asked furiously, abruptly angry at the thought of him favoring another woman, wanting him to speak only of me with fondness. "She works for Dumbledore!" 

"Minerva is my friend," he said, brushing my hair. "She helped me save Abraxas."

I scowled and stormed off outside. 

Then, in the corner of the garden where hawthorns bloomed, I knelt and cried for his soul. 

He found me in the evening, and wrapped me in his cloak. Once, his magic would have sufficed to warm. 

"You are changing," I said bitterly. "I don't want you to." 

"I chose this when I was your age, Narcissa," he said, soft-spoken among the blooms where we knelt, under a darkling sky. 

"Abraxas wouldn't want you to do this."

"I know."

It was too late. 

"It is tearing you apart," I whispered helplessly. "Can't you love him less?" 

He laughed at that, surprised by my question. 

"Don't run off again," he told me. "It worries Abraxas when the House Elves cannot find you."

"You have always found me." 

I carried his Chocolate Frog card with me everywhere. 

I had wanted him, and only him, to find me. 

"I don't want to feel so...odd," I muttered. 

"Puberty, I am told, affects women strongly. It is the hormones; they will even out gradually."

"Don't you too begin calling me hormonal!" I exclaimed, furious again. 

I had had enough of it from the boys at school teasing me whenever I began crying or whenever I was eating more than my usual! I had developed bouts of consuming voraciously during certain times of the month and near-starving at other times. Madam Pomfrey kept pressing me to take nutrition potions. 

"Bullying is a common phenomenon in puberty," Voldemort told me. He sighed and summoned the garish peacock feather throw from their rooms. 

"Shan't Abraxas mind?" 

"He has an unnumbered many of these." 

So he spread it on the muddy earth, and lay down. I lay down beside him, and watched the stars of the Blacks. Only the hawthorns saw us. 

"Which one is your favorite?" I asked sleepily. 

"Delphinus," he said absently. "I was traveling in the Americas, in the far north of Nunavut, and all was cloaked on the winter sky, but for the constellation of Delphinus. Those were the first stars I had seen in many months of bitter cold."

"Job's coffin," I remembered, from my Astronomy lessons. 

"The asterism," he murmured, letting me take his hand in mine, and point it at the four-cornered asterism of the coffin.

"Professor Sinistra told us its myth." 

He hummed, waiting patiently. 

"It is about a woman, she said. A girl, a woman, an egg. Sealed in the coffin because she ran away from a God that wished to have her for himself." 

"I have seen your fears," he said quietly. 

"I thought-" I began crying again, and hated my hormones once more. "I thought you were like me."

Sexless and incomplete, fundamentally misshapen or broken.   
  
"The girls at school said-" I cut off, unwilling to speak the cruel words they had mocked me with. "Is it a choice? Do I have a choice?"

"What is our choice? What is fated unto us?" He sighed, and traced the coffin of Job with our joined hands. "If you are averse to sex, then don't fret about it. What does worrying serve?"

He was right. What did worrying serve? Was he right? He had not let questions of fate or choice stop him when he had saved Abraxas. 

What would he have done in my place? 

As a woman, I knew my value was nil if I refused to marry and birth children for my husband. I did not think I would mind pregnancy, I mused. 

"Which of my memories did you remove?" I asked softly. "Was there something-"

Had there been something in my childhood that had led to my unnaturalness when it came to this? Surely this aversion could not be something fundamentally eked into my body from birth? All the girls I knew dreamed about kissing and sex. What had brought about my strong and fearful dislike? 

"When you are ready, you may have your memories," he said briskly. "I thought it unwise to have a ten-year-old child cope with them, given how unprepared and inept Abraxas and I were to aid you to come to terms with the tale of your parents."

He had grown in sensitivity and empathy, over my years with them, but he was himself still, sharp-tongued and callous in his choice of words. 

And yet, all I knew was frightful joy. 

"You didn't kill them," I said gratefully, weeping again. 

"Is that what Walburga is telling you now?" he asked, amused. Aunt Walburga and Sirius and Regulus, and the boys at school, and the girls in my dormitory. 

_Poor thing!_ they said, as they had once said at my mother's funeral. _Poor thing! She has to live with her parents' murderer!_.

"Walburga has never forgiven me for slighting her, when she made to woo me to an encounter. I am afraid my proclivities seemed to her a betrayal."

He had never concealed his preferences from Lucius, Bella, or I, whether it be at the dinner table or in everyday gestures of affection he bestowed freely upon Abraxas. Had he been the same at school? Had they not mocked him for it? Had they called him a faggot?   
  
"Aunt Walburga said you are unnatural. That it is a perversion."

"We can be blissfully unnatural together, then," he said lightly, bringing my hand to his heart. "Abraxas has considered it ill-advised, on occasion, but neither he nor I have cast our choices in terms of abnormality."

Oh, but Abraxas was right. It was ill-advised. 

So we lay there, on that peacock feather throw, and watched the stars. He listened to the myths I told him of the stars, humming absently the tune of _Mr. Soul_ that we had danced to. 

Under my palm, under the hawthorn, under Job's coffin in the constellation of Delphinus, was a man crumbling because of his heart's resolute choice.

A flower fell on his chest, into a felloe of my splayed fingers.  
  
"Did you know, that in the Victorian language of flowers, hawthorn meant hope?" he asked me softly. 

"My mother called them mayflowers." 

"Druella told me once that it is hawthorn that healed the broken heart." 

"You knew her?" I asked him greedily, hearkening to his words of her. 

"We were partners in Herbology," he reminisced. "She was the sole reason I managed an O.W.L. in the subject. A green thumb, was hers."

Even in my father's wretched backyard, poppies had bloomed beneath my mother's window. 

"Hers was a wand of hawthorn," Voldemort told me. 

We watched the skies arch to dawn, tilting into a new day. 

* * *

**A horse with no name**

_1971_

Lucius was in love with a widow. 

"Marry him," Voldemort told me. "Let him keep that woman. He shan't ask for anything you are unwilling to partake in."

We were playing wizarding chess in the gardens, under the hawthorns. I was nervous, as I awaited the O.W.L. results. 

"He is as a brother!" I exclaimed, for the umpteenth time. 

Voldemort, when he had one of his ideas, was as a dog with a bone, worrying at it incessantly. His resolve was not a myth alone. 

"He shan't want sexual relations with you," he said again, persistent. 

His rook opened a path to his queen. He was a creature of resolve, and he was equally a creature of impulse. I suppressed a grin at that characteristic mistake he had made. 

"You aren't winning this one," he insisted. 

"I have won the last twenty," I reminded him.

He sighed, frustrated, and turned his attention to salvage the game.   
  
It was his mind too, I realized, horrified. Where once his resoluteness had been my raft, his mind was unravelling, as silk unspun, and the harrowing tells of it were evident in how he clenched his fingers into his wrists to keep focused, in how he often counted to himself and spoke to himself conjugations in Latin. 

"I should like to restore your memories today," he said quietly. 

He did not think he would be, in the future, capable of the stillness of mind required to undo that potent charm he had cast six years ago, without damaging me. 

Under Abraxas Malfoy's ash trees, under the hawthorn that had bloomed for us, I feared for the war Voldemort was mired in. Albus Dumbledore suffered from neither an infirmity of the mind nor a shattered magic. 

\----

"Should I calm my mind?" I asked tentatively.

Bella and Lucius had been attempting to teach me Occlumency, in vain. They said I was too emotional to understand the how of it. Bella, calling me emotional. 

"I hope that shan't be necessary," he said, and the lack of certainty in his voice grieved me once more. 

I remembered how he had been, when he had come to me first, absolute and unwavering in himself. The toll his shattering had begun taking on him, irrevocably, I strove my best not to think of. 

His magic was a bulwark against which mine crashed frantic, as the memories came pouring in from the crevices of my mind he had dug them deep into. Stripped swift of the cloaking of his magic, I remembered all. 

I remembered the child alone in a home of blues, watching from behind iron-grilled windows a woman laid out in a coffin in the middle of an ugly backyard stripped of her poppies. I remembered the marks of my father's grip on my wrists, and how my ears had rung when he had thrown me to the floor of my room and locked me in. 

I remembered that Bella had wept many a time when she had to depart for Hogwarts, and leave me alone in our home of blues. 

I remembered that Dromeda had never returned after her fifth year at Hogwarts. 

"Please," I whispered, and crossed the distance between us. 

His magic was splintering despite himself, as rotten wood eaten inside out by termites, and he still stitched together painfully a semblance of comfort in its wrap about mine. 

It was of porous make, and through the barrier crossed to me a hungry boy in an orphanage, mocked and reviled, loathed and loatheful, amoral and resolute to survive. All had been ambition and revenge, until the poliovirus had struck down Abraxas Malfoy. 

Then he had tied his heart to hearthstone. 

He rued and yet was proud. He cherished how he was loved, and yet feared his end. _Have of me_ , every iota of his magic, splintered, cried out to the one draining him. The bond between them was old and dark, and had not been one partaken of equals before. 

Every breath Abraxas drew was from Voldemort's magic. In a bid to leave him life, Voldemort had splintered himself, until he was fragments of magic in Abraxas's hands. 

Seeing him tremble and falter, I took a deep breath and centered myself. For the first time in my life, my mind was calm. 

I went to the gramophone, and put a record on. 

_"I've been through the desert_  
_On a horse with no name._  
_In the desert, you can't remember your name_  
_'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."_   
  
In a home of blues, then, a man wearing summer's flax had touched his heart before all, and had been condemned for it by vicious gossiping tongues. 

He had come to me, bearing two Chocolate Frogs, each yielding a card of Albus Dumbledore. He had read to me, and taught me too, until I could read that Albus Dumbledore loved chamber music.

He had not given me his name. 

In a home of blues, then, a man without a name had embraced me with clumsy magic, and saved me after parricide, sealing my memories away to keep me safe from Azkaban and from myself. 

He had not given me his name. 

He had taken me to his home, to his heart, to where he frayed to dissolute nothingness and yet held himself as another's. 

He had then given me his name, and hawthorn had bloomed under the ash trees of our home of blues. 

_"I was looking at a river bed_  
_And the story it told of a river that flowed_  
_Made me sad to think it was dead."_

He was dying before me, if death be a word for what was his end. 

"Narcissa," he said, clearing his throat, no doubt about to dismiss me and what I had gleaned. 

"By my hearth, in my home, I shall always keep you safe," I swore to him, and went to kiss his cheek, embracing him in my arms. 

He bent then, and his magic lessened its shields of facade, and showed me the decomposing matter of it. 

_"The ocean is a desert with it's life underground_  
_And a perfect disguise above_  
_Under the cities lies a heart made of ground_  
_But the humans will give no love."_

"There is no return," he said ruefully. 

I was my mother's daughter. She had grown poppies in a cruel man's desert, nameless and wandless as she had been in that home of blues. 

Hawthorns had bloomed of my magic, from my tears, from my emotions, drawing strong from the wellspring of Voldemort's magic in this house where he had raised me. 

_"I've been through the desert_  
_On a horse with no name._  
_In the desert, you can't remember your name_  
_'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."_

What might he have, when not a whit of sanity and memory was left to him? I did not know. I knew what I meant to give him. 

"I shall always keep you safe," I promised. 

I would remember for him his name, when he no longer could. 

His smile was a wan, disbelieving, soft flame that kindled unto me resolution. 

* * *

**Heart of Gold**

_1981_

"It has to be you," I said flatly. "I am not allowing anyone else into my birthing chamber."

"Cissy, I know nothing of birth!" Bella complained. "You need a midwife." She waved the scroll Lucius and she had put together. "We have the best of the best here. Pick one, or two, or however many you wish!"

"I don't want this." 

"That is what you said when we asked you to marry Lucius." 

Marrying Lucius had not been a chore. Our living arrangements had been unperturbed. I continued tending to Abraxas. I continued to hold Voldemort to sanity with conversation and company as best as I could. I continued to patch up Lucius and Bella whenever it was needed. 

"This is what you said when you thought about impregnation."

The potion had not been a chore. The idea of drinking a concoction that contained Lucius's seed had been abominable, but I had managed to quell my dislike. 

I quite enjoyed pregnancy. 

Bella and Abraxas doted on me. Lucius kept bringing me whatever my cravings wanted. Voldemort, despite his general disinclination towards these feminine mysteries, was patient in teaching me spells to balance my weight whenever the amniotic fluid shifted, and brewed me endlessly inventive potions to control my mood swings. 

He had brewed for me multiple potions for postpartum depression. My mother, Bella suspected, had been prey to this syndrome. Voldemort had developed the tendency to make utmost use of the times when his mind was cooperative. So he had taken Bella's opinion, and decided to prepare for postpartum depression, should the affliction arise in me. While the war kept him occupied, he would on occasion stoop to cook for me Cullen Skink and Svarsoppa, that I had undying cravings for. 

\----

The midwives Bella and Lucius chose were of little use. 

"It is breech, I think," one of them told Bella, wringing her hands. 

"Why are you telling me?" Bella exclaimed. "She is bleeding buckets! Do something, you hag!" 

Lucius had washed his hands of the affair, turning pale at the first sight of blood. So it was Bella in the birthing chamber, holding my hand in a death grip as she watched me exsanguinate. 

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," she whispered, eyes wide as saucers, when my pulse began stuttering out, when my magic turned haywire, lashing against the midwives and sending them reeling into the walls. 

"How many of your mother's deliveries were breech?" another popped up to ask. 

"Our mother is six feet in the ground! Shall I dig her up to ask?" Bella demanded, frightened. 

I clutched the Chocolate Card of Albus Dumbledore I held tight in my left hand. 

\----

When I woke, he was sitting by my bed, head in his hands, exhausted, as a candle wick fraying and still burning itself to the end as a solitary light. The cuckoo clock chimed four in the morning. 

"Bella has the child," he said hoarsely. "A boy. Healthy. You are well too. All is well." 

All was not well. 

I could feel his magic washing through me, healing and mending, strengthening, renewing. How many times had he saved Abraxas? The knowing in his magic was a long learned one. 

"There is little left in you," I told him.

I was drained of birth and afterbirth, and yet he was closer to collapse than I was. 

"Not now," he said tiredly, getting to his feet. "I shall have Bella send the child in." 

"Abraxas shall come here for breakfast," I told him. "Accompany him."

\-----

Abraxas's condition had taken a turn for the worse in the past few years. Voldemort carried on lightly for his sake, and he carried on equally lightly for Voldemort's sake. 

Yet, when each thought that the other was not observing, their facades would crumble, and the yearning, frightened desperation in their features was the one and the same. 

"Have you named the child?" Abraxas asked me. 

"Draco," I said brightly. 

Lucius and I had made our lists separately, and had compared them. Draco had been the first name written on our lists both. We were of like mind, even if we had no draw to each other past the familial. 

"A Black name," Abraxas said, pleased. "Another starchild, come to us." Then he asked, "Have you given a thought to godparents? Perhaps your sister and her husband?" 

"I have decided on one," I said hastily, before he could continue. "Who the godmother must be, I have not decided yet. I want Voldemort as his godfather."

Voldemort hid his surprise poorly, and the stricken flash of fear on his features was that of the boy in the orphanage, who had hungered and survived. 

"Narcissa, the war-" Abraxas began gently, ever gentle when it came to interceding between Voldemort and the world that understood him poorly. I was not the rest of the world. I was their Narcissa. 

"He is my family," I said, blunt as a hammer, for the time for nuances was past us. "Let him speak for himself, Abraxas."

For four decades, Voldemort had poured his magic into Abraxas, sustaining him from breath to breath, with a bond of magic that gyved him as once the slaves had been gyved by the slavers on cotton plantations, as now the House Elves were gyved to families. He had splintered himself, so that Abraxas may live, drawing on the fragments of him left, even if he were to die in the war. 

Abraxas smiled at me, pleased by my determination. He and I had shared a cause, over the past decade, to see to this man in our keeping, strange of heart and condemned for it. 

"My dearest Narcissa," Abraxas said proudly. And it was more than mere pride. It was a token. 

He summoned the House Elves, to help him return to his quarters. 

"No, no," he waved Voldemort away. "Stay and give her your answer. You know where to find me afterwards. I have always waited for you."

After his departure, Voldemort and I stared at each other, silent. 

"You are not cruel," he said finally, staring at where my toes were protruding from the blankets Bella had piled on me. 

"There is no cruelty intended in my wish," I confirmed. Another would have balked that his mind had leapt to cruelty first, but it was his way, and I was inured to it. 

"I shan't survive, Narcissa," he said softly. "I shan't survive as myself. With every passing day, when Abraxas wakes beside me, he spends an hour telling me who I am, and who he is, so that I may remember. With every passing day, it takes me longer to come back to myself." 

"I asked this of you so that you may know that my promise to you shall be upheld," I said gently, as gently as Abraxas spoke to him whenever his mind wavered. "I wish to take you into my family, as mine to keep safe." 

Fifteen years ago, he had saved me. 

"I have dreams," he said abruptly. "Perhaps the product of a mind in disrepair."

He looked away, ashamed and terrified. 

"What did you dream of?"

"There is a woman in the major arcana, a maiden, who has her hand brave on the neck of a lion that has bowed to her with its head on her lap." 

"Strength," I remembered, from my Divination lessons. 

"Strength," he echoed. "I dreamed of her, and her face and form was yours."

He finally met my gaze. 

"I selected a song," I told him. 

"Play it for us, then." 

_"I want to live_  
_I want to give_  
_I've been a miner_  
_For a heart of gold"_

He had found his, in Abraxas, and what hadn't it cost him? 

I had found mine, in his, and from the wellspring of him had my hawthorn bloomed bright in these gardens where ash trees were rooted deep. 

\------

I buried Abraxas beneath the hawthorn, in November, mere days after Godric's Hollow.

Bella was in Azkaban.

Lucius was awaiting trial. 

So I buried Voldemort's heart under my hawthorn, where traces of his magic still surged in rivulets under the earth's cover. 

Then I returned to the house, alone, but for a babe in my arms, and put the gramophone on. 

_"I crossed the ocean,_  
_For a heart of gold,_  
_I've been in my mind,_  
_It's such a fine line._  
_That keeps me searching_  
_For a heart of gold_  
_And I'm getting old._ "

I sat at Abraxas's desk, and picked up his quill, and opened the diary he had left behind. 

* * *


	3. The heart's filthy lesson

**Under Pressure**

_1985_

"Cissy," Lucius said quietly. 

I paused in my writing.

" _Pressing down on you, no man ask for_  
_Under pressure that burns a building down_  
_Splits a family in two_  
_Puts people on streets"_

Lucius stopped the music that the gramophone had been playing. 

Ensconced at Abraxas's mahogany desk, I watched the arboreal line of ash trees and the fallow hawthorns that had not bloomed once since Godric's Hollow.

Lucius had returned from Azkaban, horrified and frightened, and had cut off his relations with that American divorcee of his he had loved long and well. Turning away from her, he had given the entirety of his attention to our son, to little Draco. 

He feared that the boy would be raised by the House Elves if he left me to my devices. He had begun becoming more vocal, over the years, as I wrote in the Diary ceaselessly. 

"How do you know he lingers?" Lucius asked finally. 

I sat back in Abraxas's chair.

"You have wandered through Albania and Austria, through Hungary and Slovakia, through the Carpathian wilderness, searching for him," he said. "You have nothing to show for it, Cissy."

My letters to Bella returned unanswered. The Aurors refused to give her the correspondence. She was alive. That she did not write back did not mean that she was dead. 

"Cissy, we must acknowledge that it has been five years with not a whiff of rumor. We have paid informants in every Wizarding town, we have hired mercenaries, we have consulted Seers and Shamans, and to no avail." 

I skimmed the faded, cracked leather of the diary's cover. Faint, as a song sung under-water by the mermen, sparkled a magic verdure I knew as my own heartbeat. 

"I gave up Wallis to raise our son," Lucius continued, frothing into a tirade, frowning and pacing. "We must move on, together. Please, Cissy, let us go to the Americas. Let us send Draco to Ilvermony. Or to Durmstrang. Let us start anew."

The Aurors had never stopped surveilling us. Crouch had monitoring spells on Lucius's wand. The restrictions had once seemed as if we had gotten off lightly, compared to our families or friends. After five years, they had begun to wear on Lucius. The toll of his separation from his American mistress did not aid. 

"I did not ask you to give her up," I said flatly. "My place is here."

My place was in this house, where Voldemort's magic lingered still, where I had buried Abraxas under the hawthorn, where ash trees lined the arboreal path in remembrance of a man who had been loved fiercely and madly by another, loved enough to cut up his soul and magic and to bind them in slavish offering. 

My place was in this home of blues, where I had been brought by my savior as a ten year old child, and taught me to dance to _Mr. Soul_ , where we had watched the stars of the Delphinus together. 

I had been starving waif, locked away, illiterate. He had fed me and taught me to read. 

I had been dying parricide. He had saved me and taken me to this home of his with another. 

I had been a teenager frightened of sex, and repulsed too to make myself sick, mocked and bullied, shy and socially inept, eating too much and then not enough. He had come to me and told me that it mattered not at all, putting aside his aversion and cluelessness when it came to teenage girls. 

How many times, in how many places, in how many ways, had he succored me? 

Even unto the end, when all his magic was scattered needles falling askew about him, when every morning Abraxas needed to speak to him for hours to remind him of himself, he had succored me. 

I was all that he had left.

Rising from my seat, I told Lucius, "Return to Wallis. My place is here." 

"Cissy, you must not-" 

Panic flashed across his face, before it was replaced by desperate determination. He came to me and caught me by the shoulders. 

"Please, Cissy, I cannot protect you."

"Take Draco with you," I said quietly. 

Cygnus had been my father. Abraxas had been his. Lucius had not been raised to suffer and endure and avenge. Let our son be raised as he had been. 

\----

"Mrs. Malfoy," Slughorn wheezed, as he chivvied me into his humble abode in Jersey. 

A young girl, no more than twenty-five, tanned and freckled, beamed at me and bustled about making tea. 

He had always liked them young. Myrtle and I had commiserated in her bathroom about Slughorn's wandering eye. 

I had no inclination to acts of sex, but I wondered often about the logistics of engaging in intimacy, when one party was corpulent and the other lissome. 

"What brings you here, Mrs. Malfoy?" Slughorn asked, once the ritual of tea was seen to, and his beady eyes were suddenly sharp with the intelligence that had made him an effective Head of House for more than half a century. 

Dissimulation would not serve me here. 

"Voldemort."

"Tom," he sighed, glancing to a portrait of a young man on fire that hung in a dark corner of his cluttered house. 

The boy was handsome, and his hands clasped to his heart were dainty as a woman's. His face was drawn into rictus, raised in supplication to the skies, and his eyes were startlingly colorless. He reminded me of the Shamans of Peru in their ayahuasca-induced trances of agony's ecstasy. 

In the forest clearing of ash trees, hedged in by wild holly, knelt upon mud and stone and snow, leaning against a cauldron of copper, under the quadrilateral of Job's coffin in the constellation of Delphinus, an eldritch fire surrounded him.

His magic, evergreen and ancient, clung to the portrait's edge, a living, viscous thing that greeted mine in raw knowing. 

"I followed him into the Forest," Slughorn told me. "He had been desperate when he had come to me, to coerce me into yielding the secrets of the soul. He had been slipshod in his memory modification charms, frantic as he had been in his race against death to save Abraxas. Frightened for him, I went after him, and found him invoking that ancient rite of slavery, of soul's magic yielded to another. I returned him to Hogwarts. He was deliriously ill for two nights, but he recovered before Abraxas. His magic had been a fine thing, then, ebullient, extraordinarily resilient."

"I tried to take sense into him, afterwards, for I knew the course he contemplated."

"He was a man of resolution," I said tiredly, running a finger over the agonized and determined lines of the boy in the portrait. 

"Oh, he was a precious thing, when he came to me first, starveling, bright-eyed and optimistic." 

The fond wistfulness in Slughorn's voice took me aback. He had favored his Slytherins, but he had not loved any of us. 

"He would use the Floo in my quarters to nip in and out, so that he may rush to London to the trading floors, to gamble on the Muggle exchanges."

Gambling, Abraxas had called Voldemort's fondness for investing in the Muggle world. Gambling, Slughorn called it too. Those old investments of his in International Business Machines (IBM) had manifold multiplied. When it rained, when I had been a child of eleven or twelve, Voldemort had taken me a few times to the brook that flowed through the grounds, and taught me to make paper boats from the old Financial Times newspapers he stacked away.

"Orphan child, eldritch and still precious to me." Slughorn sighed. "I had hoped his might have been a different fate."

I swallowed and looked once more at that portrait of a boy on fire, before turning away. 

"You painted him from memory."

"The painting is imbued with memory," he corrected me. "His magic crept into every living thing in that clearing, tree and bird and beast and man." His eyes were fiercely intelligent as he beheld me. "His magic is upon you, Mrs. Malfoy."

"Narcissa," I offered.

He nodded portentously.

"He came to me a few times, in the 1960s, to seek my counsel on the care and keeping of young girls. He was at his wit's end, and fretted over each emotional up and down of yours, and wondered what was normal for a teenaged girl and what wasn't."

I laughed, despite myself, remembering how clumsy and determined Voldemort had been to see me to a modicum of normality. 

"Cygnus was a cruel child. Druella fell in love with him, as many teenaged girls do, drawn to the darkness in him. She thought she might remake him a better man, as only adolescents may dream."

I sat down on his ugly chaise, upholstered in crocodile leather. 

"She had a green thumb," he continued.

"Tom was kind to her, in his own way. He had only two he might have called friends. Minerva McGonagall and your mother. You have taken after your mother." 

Minerva McGonagall had helped him save Abraxas. I had once been a teenager jealous of his fondness for the Deputy Headmistress. I had not known then that he had come to my mother's funeral and saved me for her sake. 

"He was fond of your mother. He was fond of Minerva McGonagall." Slughorn sighed once again. "He cherished you."

"Albus told me all. He was an orphaned child, born of a poor girl's obsession with a Muggle lad. She had tricked the lad with Amorentia. He left her when he came to his senses. She died on the streets."

I had suspected. I had long suspected. I had not cared to find out. 

"He cherished you. If he had been another man, he might have known the name of his affection: _storge_ , the love of a man for his family."

That he had not known the name of love did not mean that it had not been. He had been fond of Bella, but theirs had been a friendship rooted in a shared cause, a fondness of the mentor and the mentored. His fondness for me had been cut of another cloth. 

"Why have you told me this?" I asked Slughorn. 

He was not a man given to nostalgia, despite the fondness that he wore true. 

"You are looking in the wrong places, Narcissa," he said quietly, with no trace left of that old man lost to the past. "You must look where he knew to look."

\----

Privet Drive was a cookie-cutter suburban utopia. Voldemort would have balked at it. He had loved the country. He had once told me that he liked the seaside. He had loved his city of London. He had shuddered at the suburbs, whenever he had had to venture into them. 

There was a little boy, waif, starved, skin and bones, in the garden, knelt in the mud, tending to petunias and lilies. It was the magic of Voldemort's splintered tatters of soul that woke first to me, greeting me in joyous abandon, and I opened myself to it. Upon its torn verdure, nestled and rooted deep, were hedges of holly that stung and poisoned. 

The boy looked up, perhaps alerted by the ripples of magic about him, and the quiet exhaustion in his eyes was an ancient thing that I knew well. It was the resignation that a starved girl in her home of blues had worn behind grilled windows as she watched her mother's funeral from her prison. It was the desperation that an orphaned boy that lived on the streets of London had known everyday until to Hogwarts he had come. 

"Hello, Harry."

"My Aunt isn't home," he said softly, flushing at being addressed and quickly averting his eyes in fear. 

I knelt beside him and gave him a Chocolate Frog. 

"What is this?" He asked suspiciously, looking up and down the street, as if afraid that someone might come and snatch him by the ear should he dare to claim the chocolate. His stomach grumbled loud. Desperate, he grabbed the chocolate from me with his dirty hands and began unwrapping it. I looked away as he ate it all, without questioning the magic of it, greedy as only the long-starved was. 

"Do you know to read?" I asked him quietly, when he was done, when he was poking curiously at the card that came with the frog. I offered him another chocolate frog that he hastily took. 

He shook his head. 

In the summer's scorching sun, I knelt in a garden of lilies and petunias, and read to him. 

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE  
CURRENTLY HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS  
Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark Wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and ten-pin bowling.   
  


"What is chamber music?" 

"Church music."

"I don't like it," he confessed. "They call me a freak." 

"You aren't."

"My name is Harry," he said hopefully, messy-haired and bright-eyed, looking to be rescued from his lot. 

"Harry," I greeted him. 

He beamed. Was it the first time another had called him by his name without spite? 

"You are very pretty," he whispered. "Prettier than my aunt." 

I laughed, and he laughed too, shyly pleased by my reaction. Then, he looked about furtively, and plucked for me a lily. I helped him tuck it on my dress with his muddy fingers.

"My favorite flower," he admitted. 

"My mother grew poppies," I said softly. I plucked a lily for him, and preserved it never to die, and conjured an earthen vase to place it in. 

"Will you read to me again?" he asked shyly, tearful, clutching his vase to his heart. 

So I read to him again and again of Albus Dumbledore, and coaxed him to read with me. 

"One for you, one for me," I told him, and gave him a chocolate frog card to keep. 

In the magic that clung to him, pained and fluttering half-alive, staved by thorns of holly, bloomed the healing hawthorn, knitting the torn. I weakened as from me the greedy, starving magic drew all, as from me the boy had grabbed the chocolate frog. 

The boy clung to my skirts when I rose to leave. 

"Will you return?" He asked softly. 

"We will meet again, Harry," I promised. 

"Did you know my parents? Were they freaks too? Am I-" he began crying softly. "Will you take me with you?"

I bent to kiss the scar on him, and a final hawthorn bloomed. 

"We will meet again, Harry," I vowed to him, to this boy that carried precious and eldritch magic. 

\----

When I arrived home, I knelt under the patch of fallow hawthorn that had not bloomed since 1981, and cried until the night broke to soft dawn. 

The House Elves found me there, and ferried me inside, and cosseted me with warm cocoa. 

The gramophone began playing _Under Pressure_ once more, as the House Elves sought to enliven me up. 

" _For love is an old fashioned word_  
_And love dares you to care for_  
_The people on the edge of the night"_

I had not even the magic left to warm myself. A little better than a squib, and yet all I knew was victory. 

The war was not over, but I had won that day. 

I would bring him home.

* * *

**The Heart's Filthy Lesson**

_1991_

"Cissy, what were you thinking?" Severus hissed, as he grabbed my arm and dragged me away from the dark alley where a vampire had dragged me off to.

I wondered if Lucius had taken him into confidence.

Over the years, Lucius had begun fearing for me. He had returned once more to the Manor and brought Draco with him. 

Wallis visited him at the Manor often. We were coming to a quiet cohabitation. I enjoyed her company. She was not Bella, but she loved Lucius and Draco, and that sufficed.   
  
Lucius feared that I was becoming reckless. I had refused to tell him what had happened to my magic. He had resigned himself to keeping watch over me, and hiring others to watch over me when he could not. He had hoped that having Draco about me would temper my adventures. He had not hesitated from frequently upbraiding me about my neglect of the boy. 

"Cissy!" Severus muttered, shaking his head, patching the puncture wounds on my neck with his wand.

"Hawthorn," I breathed, clutching his shoulder for balance. "Your wand is of hawthorn. It wasn't." 

"They broke my first wand when they took me to Azkaban after the Dark Lord's fall," he said, distracted. 

"Hawthorn is a healer's wand. I thought-" I tried to focus. "It favors women." 

"Oh, not you too!" He said grumpily. "I like the wand. Why must everyone keep telling me that it is a woman's wand?"

When I returned to the manor, I went to the Diary. 

Abraxas had consulted many seers in the last years of his life. The final seer he had consulted had been Sibyl Trelawney, the one who had delivered the prophecy of the Dark Lord's equal to Albus Dumbledore and begun the events leading to Godric's Hollow.

 _"Once of ash, once of hawthorn, once of holly."_ Trelawney had spoken to Abraxas. 

Ash had been Abraxas's wand. 

Hedges of holly, poison and thorns, staved the evergreen of magic that clung to Harry. Hawthorn had bloomed where mine met Voldemort's, healing, and it had bloomed first on the grounds of the manor under the stars of Delphinus. 

* * *

**There he is (at my door)**  
  


_1995_

"I was not sure if he was alive," Severus admitted, as we waited together for Lucius to wake. 

Severus had healed him, with a wand of hawthorn. 

"You must leave," I told Severus, as the manor woke from its slumber to a familiar magic. 

"Cissy, you can't be here when-"

"Leave." 

"There is nobody to protect you!" 

I ushered him to the Floo. Then I closed the door behind Lucius's bed of healing and walked down the stairs. 

\----

There, by the doors, alien and yet familial, burning in mourning he stood. 

A portrait Slughorn had kept, of a young boy on fire. 

The magic of him, vehement and bitter and spattered by old and new pains, cloaked suffocating the manor's quiet contentment to see him returned to this land. 

"Narcissa." 

"Voldemort." 

"You did not look for me," he said, and raised his wand of yew. 

The Cruciatus shattered the bannister and the chandeliers as it lashed about as light refracting, until it cindered ashen the carpet at his feet. 

He lowered his wand. 

"Where is your magic?" He demanded, striding across the expanse of hall that separated us, coming to the stairs where I stood awaiting him. 

"Narcissa!" He exclaimed, as realization came to him. "Foolish girl! What have you done?" 

_Foolish girl_ , he had called Lily Potter who had stood between him and her child. 

_Foolish girl_ , he called me, and his scattered magic came to me in a fierce, protective, frightened clasp. 

I moved to embrace him, tired and victorious, and this, then, was heart's filthy lesson. 

He held me, frantic and disturbed, and asked me in a broken voice, "Why?"

 _I shall always return to you_ , he had promised Abraxas. _I shall always wait for you_ , Abraxas had promised him. And I would bring him home, when he was lost. 

"Narcissa, my mind-"

It was a scattered thing, with neither sense nor lucidity. 

One day at a time. He had never known the merit of patience. 

"Come dine with me," I told him, and led him up the stairs, to the private dining quarters where Abraxas had once held court for his eclectic family. 

His memories were unreliable and distorted, but he chivvied the House Elves away from the kitchens and cooked for me Cullen Skink. 

I placed a record upon the gramophone. _Heart's Filthy Lesson_ began playing. 

_"Something in our skies_  
_Something in our skies_  
_Something in our blood_  
_Something in our skies"_

"I cannot remember what the name of this dish is," he said quietly, as I ladled him a portion.

"Cullen Skink," I told him. 

He looked to me desperately, striving to remember, and failing. 

_"Paddy will you carry me, I think I've lost my way_  
_Heart's filthy lesson, heart's filthy lesson_  
_I'm already five years older, I'm already in my grave_  
_I'm already heart's filthy lesson, heart's filthy lesson"_

"Skink means the hough of beef. When the poor people in northern Scotland were unable to find scraps of beef due to economic strains but had plenty of fish to cook with, and smoked haddock was found everywhere, meat stews transformed into fish-based soups, but the name skink stuck," I explained. "Cullen is a town in Scotland." 

"My dearest Narcissa," he said softly, and I began weeping into my soup. He rose, anxious, and swiftly came to me, and his arms, clumsy, were determined to comfort. 

\----

"Return to Belfast," I suggested to Lucius, as I sat by his bedside and watched him heal. 

"And leave you here with him?" He exclaimed. "Cissy, he is a heartbeat away from going on a madman's rampage."

"And you cannot protect me if he does," I told him, waving a hand in illustration over his battered body. "Please, Lucius, I cannot see you harmed again."

He set his mouth in mulish stubbornness. 

\---

Draco, quiet, sat upon a rock by the brook, watching the water's way through the wold. 

"I wish you would wait out the war in Belfast, with Wallis," I admitted. 

He shook his head. 

"Draco." 

He sighed and unearthed a pressed paper boat to show me. The Financial Times. When I stood stricken, he came to my side and caught my hand in his. 

"Papa said he is my godfather." 

"He is."

"Harry Potter's godfather was a criminal who had killed many innocent strangers and had been condemned to death. Potter defended him."

Sirius was my cousin. 

"If Potter can defend Black, I can defend this strange man you gave up your magic for, Mum," Draco said firmly. 

\----

Matters came to a head after the disastrous gambit in the Department of Mysteries. 

"Bella!" I exclaimed when Voldemort returned with her, and flung her to the floor at my feet. 

She was shaking, from the Cruciatus.

"Bella!" I cried out, horrified. Her health was in tatters still from Azkaban. How could Voldemort harm her in this state? 

She tried to speak, but her voice failed her. 

"See to her," Voldemort ordered, and turned away. 

"See to her!" I demanded, walking to him, furious. "I have no magic because I mended your soul to a semblance of itself, you ungrateful bastard! And you have repaid me by harming my sister!"

His whiplash hex caught me on the cheek. 

Blood brimmed forth, from my burning flesh. I bit down my lips to stifle a sob, as my sister lay trembling in convulsions on my floor. The House Elves were cowering in the corners of the hall, frightened to come to my aid and yet worried for me.

"This heart's filthy lesson you have taught me, I shan't forget," I spat.

The slumbering magic of the manor woke, turning cold to him, here in a place where he had only been loved before, by Abraxas's heart of gold, by a young girl who had bloomed as hawthorn upon evergreen yew. 

His expression turned haunted, and he left, striding away as if the hounds of hell were at his heels. 

I turned abruptly, hands clenched and bleeding still, and went to tend to my sister. 

\----

"It was not him," Bella told me quietly, when she woke in the bath the House Elves had carried her to, filled with healing herbs to soothe her sensitized skin and nerves. 

The scent of lavender and chamomile, and the pungency of potions Draco had brewed and stored with neat labels on my shelves had given me a headache. Draco was turning to be a brewer on par with Severus, trained by him. Bella's skin was no longer splotchy and bruised, and lucidity had once again returned to her pain-blanked gaze of before.

"It was the boy, Potter," she said, clasping my hand in hers. 

Marked a Dark Lord's equal, and thorns of cruel holly had staved the tattered remnants of Voldemort's magic in the scar, before I had mended it with hawthorn's grace, with the last of my magic. 

"I killed Sirius," Bella said quietly. 

She held me as I cried, until the House Elves insisted that she leave the bath and warm herself by the fire. 

"He is leaving his wand behind, Missy Cissy," a house elf told me. 

I settled Bella in, and then returned to the hall once more. There, lying fallow upon the marble, was a wand of yew. 

  


* * *

**The ballad of the thin man**

Knockturn was no married woman's haunt, even in the mornings.

At night, nearing midnight, I tugged my cloak over my distinguishable features and hoped to pass unnoticed by its denizens.

 _A wand knows its way_ , Abraxas had often joked, whenever he had misplaced his wand and it had found its way to him nevertheless. 

The scattered magic that clung to the wand knew its way, leading me along the breadcrumbs until I came to a dark alley that reeked of piss and cabbages. The moon cut bright across the night, full and watchful, and under its reign, I saw the spread of failure laid out plain before me. There were werewolves, cruel and made witless by the moon's turn, and there was blood and screams, as they took what was willingly surrendered to them. 

The wand knew its way, and it surged with bright magic of evergreen's mourning in my hand, and hawthorns bloomed fierce upon the wave of fury that lashed fierce, as white fire upon the despoilers and the despoiled, striking down the wolves, leaving only a man, face drawn in a rictus of anguish, hands clasped to his naked heart, beseeching me for a mercy I refused to give. 

"Obliviate them. Even I cannot pay off the rumors of a Dark Lord screaming in the gutters of Knockturn," I told him sharply, and threw his wand to him. 

His magic clung to me still, soft in its plea. I slumped against the nearest wall, exhausted and drained once more, and watched the wisps of clouds attempting to veil the moon in vain. Good, I thought furiously. Let at least the moon see what this man's truth had become. 

He forced himself to his feet, staggering from blood-loss and pain, and did as I asked. 

Then he turned to where I waited, slumped and weakened, and asked hesitantly, "Shall I conjure you a port-key home?" 

I scowled at him. 

Awkwardly, still streaked in mud and blood and substances I cared not to identify, he looked about for his clothes and found only rags. I undid the clasp of my cloak and flung it at him. 

"You should not have come. It isn't safe," he said, covering his immodesty with the silk of my cloak. 

"I shall let you revel in your werewolf orgies in peace the next time," I replied bitterly. 

He made to speak again, but shook his head. 

Then, under the moon's unrelenting bright, I saw the grief in him at the manor's scorning of him. He had been welcome nowhere else, after Dumbledore had barred him from Hogwarts. He had been loved in no place else. The abandonment of the manor's affection had broken him in entirety. 

"Take us home," I said, tired. 

\----

In the morning, I woke to a knock at my doors. I contemplated lying in bed and pretending that I was asleep. 

Mine was this war. There was nobody else left to wage it. 

I had promised. 

So, throwing on a dressing gown and rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I went to the doors and let him in. 

He came bearing a tea-service, and fresh-baked cinnamon and walnut encrusted pear breakfast buns. The bruises and bites evident on his skin was a stark contrast to the homeliness of the picture he cut, dressed in plain woolen robes of farmer's brown. 

He set down the tea and the buns at my little table, and drew my chair for me. I poured us tea and watched him pick at a bun absently, while I gorged on mine. I had not eaten in more than a day, frightened as I had been ever since Lucius and Bella had led a contingent to the Department of Mysteries. 

"I did not-" 

"Bella told me," I said hastily, not wishing to discuss even in the most elliptical manner the events of the day before. "Why did you go there?" I asked, instead. 

"I felt her pain," he said quietly, refusing to meet my gaze. "Her health-" he cleared his throat. "I did not wish her to be harmed irreparably, after all that she has endured for my sake." Then he looked at me hesitantly, and added, "I had little desire to bring you grief again." 

_Storge_ , Slughorn had named this, even if Voldemort knew not the name of his affection. I had known, as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman, and I had sworn to protect him, to keep him safe, to bring him home. 

He cleared his throat and placed his wand carefully by my saucer. 

"You are in the middle of a war," I said shakily, as the remnants of my magic woke to the rising crest of his emotion. 

"I am not," he said, soft and worn in morning's wake. "Narcissa, my mind will defeat me before Albus Dumbledore can."

I said nothing, looking at this madman that was made of love's grief. 

"I surrender my wand to you, and my choices, and my care and keeping, until such a time as you deem fit to restore them," he said quietly, invoking the ancient rite of conservancy, the right of guardianship kin was given over one unsound of mind. 

What had he dwelled on, after our return yesterday? What had brought him to this? I set down my tea-cup and walked to his side. He was trembling, as if cold, and I saw the keen, fraught conflict of resolve and fear painted bleak on his features, as he yielded his independence. 

"I shall restore your wand to you, and your choices, and your care and keeping, when I deem fit," I swore to him, and knelt before him, to place my hands on his hollowed, bruise-marked face. 

I could not duel Albus Dumbledore for him.

However, I could win this war for him, and begin our healing's course. I meant to.

"My dearest Narcissa," he said, relieved, when I brushed a kiss along his brow.

I wondered what I ought to say. 

"What shall you appoint me to undertake today?" he asked, smiling wryly at the situation we had found ourselves in. 

"Dance with me," I blurted out.   
  
\---

So we danced together, to a record I put on, to _The Ballad of the Thin Man_ , by Dylan.

 _"You try so hard but you don't understand_  
_Just what you will say when you get home_  
_Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is_  
_Do you, Mr. Jones?"_

"You have a cruel wit," Voldemort complained, as he led me into an easy swing. 

"I learned from you," I reminded him. 

_You raise up your head and you ask, "Is this where it is?"_  
_And somebody points to you and says, "It's his"_  
_And you say, "What's mine?" and somebody else says, "Well, what is?"_

I danced with what had been yielded to me.

"I shan't harm," I promised abruptly, seeing the creases of worry at the corners of his eyes. 

"I am frightened witless. I am not frightened of you."

\----

"A child?" Bella asked, shocked. "Cissy, that is inadvisable!" 

I had not told her of the guardianship I had assumed, of surrendered wand and choice, and keeping and care. A secret of two it would remain, if I had any say in the matter. 

Every morning, we would break our fast together, he and I, and I would tell him what to undertake that day, choosing pursuits away from war's matters. It was settling him to calm, I had come to see, and I overcame my hesitance to command to give him what he desperately needed to be moored. 

"A child," I said, coaxing. "He is anchored by _storge_ , by familial bonds." 

"If you were wrong-" she began, worried. "This is a war, Cissy." 

"If I were wrong, we will have lost everything."

\----

Hawthorn blossomed in my gardens, for the first time in twenty-five years.

Bella was with child.

I found Voldemort stood under the hawthorn blooms at midnight, alone, as he watched the stars. 

"The thought of staying away is as cutting off a limb," he said wretchedly. 

"Why must you stay away?"

"I shan't suffice." He swallowed and shook his head. 

"You were. You are," I told him frankly, dropping nuance and reserve. "Cygnus Black may have sired me. He was not my father."

I pulled him to the muddy ground, and smiled when one of Abraxas's peacock feather throws came to spread itself to spare my clothes, and when I shifted close to the body beside me, he folded a clumsy hand about my shoulders to draw me closer. 

His magic was vibrant in tautened hope, despite his anxieties. For the first time, it coalesced into a verdant spread ancient and eternal, kindling warm as the earth to spring's thaw, and it came to me purposeful, to awaken the long dormant remnants of my magic. 

Streaked by mourning, bright rose his magic to spark, to flame, to incandescence, and the song of it was strung from hope's four chord carousel: wisdom, love, memory, and resolve. 

Pointing at the constellation above, I said softly, "Delphini." 

* * *

**All the madmen**

_1997_

  
I waited for Albus Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge by the River Tweed, in the town of Galashiels. By my side was Griselda Marchbanks and Lucius. 

"Mrs. Malfoy," Dumbledore greeted me, though Fudge had bustled over to Lucius and Griselda. 

"Narcissa," I told him, and showed him a sepia-stained Chocolate Frog Card from 1961. 

"An old jinx," he said, laughing. "He jinxed the Defence position and has caused me endless paperwork every year. In turn, I wrought this mischief. Any chocolate frog he picks will have my card."

"And he is quite fond of chocolate frogs."

"Indeed, the Mirror of Erised cannot lie!" Dumbledore said cheerfully, offering me his arm. 

"His magic is restored to its wholeness once more," he remarked. "The Castle has been jubilant." 

I said nothing to that. 

"Scarce a drop of magic in you left," he noted. 

"You cannot win this war," I told him flatly. "He is sane. He is whole."

"What is your proposal?"

"A wall," I said quietly. "The country shall be divided, along the old Anglo-Scottish line." 

By the Tweed, by fair Galashiels. 

On the old Black path, Dumbledore turned to face me, brows crinkled in thought. 

"I wonder what the History of Magic shall teach of this day, of this hour when Narcissa's war drew to a close." 

_Narcissa's war._

Madmen had begun this war. 

I had been left to draw folly to its end. 

\----

"Narcissa," Dumbledore said, as his party were taking their leave of us. 

"Yes, Headmaster?" 

"I had not expected this to come to pass."

I waited for him to continue. 

"I had not expected him to surrender."

Surrender was not in Voldemort's nature when it came to fate or adversity.

"He trusts you," Dumbledore said earnestly. 

"He loves me," I corrected. 

Nobody knew Voldemort as Dumbledore did. Knowing, however, was not understanding. 

I understood him.

\---

I came back to the manor. 

Bella and Rodolphus had taken Delphini to their home.

Lucius had returned to Belfast, to Wallis. 

Draco was with his friends partying away the night in London as they celebrated the end of the war. 

The gramophone was playing an old song I loved. David Bowie's _All the Madmen_. 

_Don't set me free_  
_I'm as heavy as can be_

Voldemort was at Abraxas's desk, quietly reading that diary where I had poured unto pages my wretched hope. 

"The war is over," I told him. 

His magic was a living thing, twining soft through the manor's ancient hearth and root, everliving and bright, and in its expansive surge bloomed the flowers of my quiet hope once more, my intent shaping creation drawn from his power. 

" _'Cause I'd rather stay here_  
_With all the madmen_  
_Than perish with the sad men roaming free_  
_And I'd rather play here_  
_With all the madmen_  
_For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me_ "

"This lone huntress, Artemis, who hath yoked the brood of savage lions," he said quietly, voice tinged by the complexity of his emotions as we saw an era die. 

" _I'm not quite right at all_

_Don't set me free_

_I'm as helpless as can be_ "

"I restore your wand to you, and your choices, and your care and keeping." 

"Narcissa."

"I have faith enough, for both of us," I said wryly. 

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We will have a spillover to another chapter, and then meet on Pandemic for the finale. Writing into the same AU before a novella finale helps me calibrate and get in the right headspace. Apologies for inflicting on you the results along the way. 
> 
> \----


	4. The house of the rising sun

**Young Girl Sunday Blues**

_2007_

"Not in my backyard!" Bella yelled, and shot a harmless red spell I had taught her to decorate Christmas trees.

The postman leapt out of her way, with good reason. The red she was associated with was the Cruciatus. I was not in a textbook. She was, for there were many illustrations of her casting that curse in textbooks on both sides of the Wall. Postmen were wary of her. 

"Mum, we don't have a backyard," Delphini muttered. 

"Get off my lawn!" Bella amended. 

"We don't have a lawn," Rodolphus pointed out. 

"Don't tread on me!" 

"Mum, any more conspiracy theories and we will have to put parental controls on your laptop."

Bella scowled and waved her wand, and transfigured Rodolphus's motorcycle into an overgrown lawn of slender creeping red fescue. 

Delphini sighed and went to get the mail. 

Bella helpfully summoned for me a rocking chair beside her own, on her little porch. So we sat together, in the afternoon sun, and Delphini played blaring rock music on her brand new iPhone as she taught her little pet crup to play fetch.

"Did he have to get her an iPhone?" Bella complained. 

"Delphini tells me that you spend your nights playing Bubblewrap on it," I remarked. 

"It is better than a calming potion or sex," she explained. "Did he have to get her a crup?"

"It could be worse," I said philosophically. "He could have given her a phoenix."

"I would serve it with trimmings for Christmas then," Bella replied, morbid and plump and happy, as she fanned herself with a Japanese fan that Draco had gifted her after his trip to Nara. 

There was a quiet solemnity to her as she watched the girl and the crup. 

"You were right," she said softly. 

"This moment is going into my Pensieve," I teased her. 

"Oh, but I am proud to be known as Narcissa Black's sister," she said sincerely. 

She had trusted me, even if it had cost her. She had trusted me, even when it came to Voldemort's welfare. And her trust, I realized, was why I had loved her the most among our siblings and cousins, over Regulus and Sirius, over Lucius and Andromeda. 

"What do you suppose my wand will be?" Delphini was asking the crup. "I want it to be of yew, as Papa's. I cannot have a phoenix feather as the core, because Albus Dumbledore's Fawkes gave only two."

"A wager, Bella?" 

"What do you want, Cissy? I might as well give you the prize you seek. When have I ever won a bet with you?" 

"Hawthorn shall be her wand's wood." 

Bella snorted. 

"Bella?" 

"You and I know it shall be hawthorn," she said plainly. "What shall be the core?" 

I had not any evidence to speculate. Certainly not phoenix feather, I mused. The girl was a Black. No Black had held a wand that bore phoenix feather. 

"Dragon heartstring," I wagered.   
  
Bella hummed. 

"What is your speculation?" I asked her. 

"A horned serpent." 

"A horned serpent?" I racked my memories of old lessons in the Care of Magical Creatures. "They are extinct in these parts. Ollivander does not work with the core." 

"If I win, I want your boots of crimson velvet." 

"If I win, I want _your_ boots of greengold!" I retorted. 

She had the gall to twinkle at me, reminding me of Albus Dumbledore. Bella, in her menopause, finally happy in her own skin and head, embraced her quirks with unapologetic vivacity. 

"I think my purple gown with baby macaws and toucans embroidered on it shall go with your boots," she mused. 

\----

I took Delphini to Ollivander's. 

"Ah, young Miss Lestrange! She has her father's hands, does she not?"

Delphini laughed shyly at his words, pleased, and hid behind my skirts, eyes wide in astonishment as she took in the stacks and stacks of boxes that contained wands and hummed with buzzing magic.

She did have his hands, I mused. She was Bella's child, a Black child, with our mother's forehead and our father's bright eyes. She had my willowy form and Bella's lithe grace in movement. She had Andromeda's thick-knit eyebrows. Her magic, in its mellow song, reminded us of Draco's. 

What had she inherited from her father? Bella and I had often wondered.   
  
His hands. 

Very few remembered his hands of old. Abraxas had collected art in our family gallery, from painters who had once come from near and far to render Voldemort's hands before his form had changed, before his soul's rupture had morphed the fineness of his wrists and fingers. _Hands daintier than a lady's_ , a sculptor had once opined, and had pestered Papa to have Voldemort sit for hours, so that they could mould a cast of his hands in plaster of Paris. 

Delphini had his hands, fine and small and of delicate beauty. 

I waited there, watching the dust-motes dance in agitation as Delphini tried wand after wand at Ollivander's bidding. Some burned her fingers, some leapt jerkily away from her, and some made squelchy noises of disapproval that made her giggle. 

Wands of hawthorn were the kindest to her, I noticed, for they did not harm her, for they seemed reluctant to part with her when Ollivander reclaimed them. 

Ollivander caught my gaze. 

I sighed, and awaited his verdict. 

"It is the core," he said apologetically. "These cores don't suit her, I am afraid." 

"A phoenix feather, perhaps," I wondered. She had her father's hands. 

Yew, hawthorn, holly. The prophecy had been clear. 

The wands of yew and holly had phoenix feather in their cores.

"I doubt that is the one," he offered. "I need to consult a few sources. Miss Lestrange, you shall have to return, I am afraid. I promise to have your wand ready the next time you visit me." 

"That is all right," Delphini said politely. "Aunt Narcissa, we can still go to the ice cream parlor, can't we?" 

I took her to Florean Fortescue's. 

She was chattering away, about the latest restaurants Draco had taken Scorpius and her to, about Bella's demented attempts to make toast with Fiendfyre, about the trips Rodolphus had taken Scorpius and her on his motorbike through Cotswolds. 

"And then Papa conjured for Scorpius and me these giant fantastical horned serpents from the bay. They had jewels on their heads, and made whistling sounds when they talked to each other. Papa did not really understand what we were telling him about the Water Kingdom from _Avatar_ , but Draco said we should give him points for trying!" 

I waited until she had finished her cone. 

"You are scheming," she accused me. "Mum says this is your scheming look."

"Strategizing," I corrected her. 

\----

"Papa!" 

Voldemort looked up from where he was tending to his flower beds, hands deep in the loamy Dorset mud. 

"Careful," he called to her, as she let go of my hand and scampered to him. 

I watched his magic catch her and steady her, when she stumbled. Giggling, she reached him where he was kneeling in the flower beds, and pressed a smacking kiss to his cheek and threw her hands about his neck. 

My father had been a cold and cruel man, who had wanted sons. The last, the runt, had been his final hope for a son to carry on his name. He had left me to the House Elf. 

"You shall get mud all over yourself," I warned Delphini. She beckoned me forward, exuberant in her joy. 

I went to them, and rued the mud on my skirts, but it was worth the bright grin Voldemort greeted me with. He set aside his trowel and fork, and held his hands out to me. Rolling my eyes, I drew on his magic and gave him the scouring charm he wanted, and followed it with a moisturizing charm. Left to him, he would not notice how his skin cracked in the winters. 

He laughed and coaxed Delphini to him, and they selected for me a boutonnière of his flowers. Delphinium, and my mother's poppies. 

"Delphinium," he was telling the girl. 

"Because they are my flowers!"

"Indeed," he said. "And because those are her favorites." 

She nodded solemnly, memorizing it for the next time.

"And poppies." 

"For Grandma," she said brightly. 

My mother had been a wisp of a woman who had been bedridden for most of my childhood, before my father had the House Elf put her out of her misery. I had cried and begged, but Andromeda and Bellatrix had been at school, and he had thrown me into my room and locked me there. They had buried her beneath my window, where the poppies beloved to her had grown sparse in our unkempt garden. 

I bent to let Delphini pin the boutonnière to my cloak. Her clumsy, tiny fingers struggled, before her father's hands came to aid her. 

\----

"How did Bella know it was to be a horned serpent?" I demanded, scowling, pacing, as he sat Delphini perched upon his kitchen table that overlooked the cliffs. 

"Rumbledethumps, Papa!" 

"You will fatten up if you eat potatoes everyday," I warned her. 

She shrugged. 

Her father made for her what she sought. Potatoes and cabbage and onions, butter and cheddar. It smelled divine. Despite how I was watching my waist, I fetched myself a serving. 

"We can be fat together," Delphini promised sweetly, as we tucked in. 

"A horned serpent," Voldemort said, lost in thought. "I have encountered them only in the Americas." 

"I dreamed of them, after watching _Avatar_ , after you conjured them in the bay, and told Mum. She said I would grow up to be a healer."

"Asclepius," Voldemort said, surprised. "The Staff of Asclepius was of hawthorn, and twined about it was a snake. Wizarding lore claims it was a horned serpent, with a bright jewel upon its head."

The Greek God of Healing, Asclepius. The rod of Asclepius, a snake-entwined staff, remained a symbol of medicine to our days.

"I don't want to cut a poor snake's horn for a wand," Delphini said firmly. 

"Ah, but that is not how it is undertaken," Voldemort told her, ruffling her messy curls. "The snake must offer it to you a portion of its horn, a sliver, willingly, with love."

"Only a portion?" 

"The smallest portion." 

"It shan't hurt the snake?" 

"Does it hurt you when Aunt Narcissa trims your hair?" 

That comforted her. 

"And I can go to the Americas to find the snake!"

"To Brazil," Voldemort promised her. "That is where all respectable snakes congregate." 

"Can we bring Scorpius along?" 

\---

Voldemort and I walked to the hawthorns of the manor. They had risen strong long ago, from my magic sparked bright and drawing from Voldemort's evergreen.

I had little magic left in me, after I had poured it out unto a boy's scar to heal tattered soul staved by holly's thorns and poison, but all these years later, my intent could easily draw from the openness of his magic to shape the fantastical and the sublime.

I drew from him once more, to bring forth a twig of hawthorn. 

"I wondered," I said quietly. "I wondered why it must be hawthorn."

My mother had had a wand of hawthorn before my father had broken it. Severus bore a wand of hawthorn. 

"For it is hawthorn that heals the broken heart," I reminisced, as we stood beneath mayflowers. 

"She has been my grace," Voldemort allowed. "The hawthorn that mended was not hers."

An old sacrifice of magic for protection and healing. Lily Potter had saved her boy with a mother's love. And I had saved this man with a daughter's love.

We returned together to the manor, he and I, and I held that twig of hawthorn that would shape to wand. 

"I found an old record from Abraxas's collection," I told him. 

He no longer flinched at the mention of Abraxas. Grief had leavened to soft mourning over the decades. 

"Let us have it, then," he said lightly. 

_"There is a house in New Orleans_  
_They call the Rising Sun_  
_And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy_  
_And God, I know I'm one."_

"He was not fond of this song," Voldemort told me, coming to my side where I lingered by the old Edison gramophone. 

I knew why Abraxas might have disliked this song. Theirs had been a bond of slavery, in essence, despite the love that cloaked it. 

_"Well, I got one foot on the platform_  
_The other foot on the train_  
_I'm goin' back to New Orleans_  
_To wear that ball and chain."_

Voldemort had lived in the interstitial, chaining himself willingly to sustain Abraxas from breath to breath, tearing himself to the soul, until his magic had fallen about him as scattered needles. 

"When I returned, the hollow where that bond had been, was as a centuries-old ash uprooted by the trunk and left charred by lightning," he said quietly. "Have you wondered how a house elf survives when it is ruptured away from the household by its master's death?" 

I shook my head, sorrowed by the meaning in his words.   
  
"You are his heir," he said. 

I was Abraxas's heir. And to me, Voldemort had come, to surrender his will and magic, his care and keeping, when he had needed a raft in a mad sea. 

"Why did it change?" I asked tremulously, facing him, seeing only hard-won sanity, seeing only a magic and soul made whole. "Why did you leave me?"

He had gone to Swanage, to a cottage by the sea on a scarp-sloped cliff that ran to the chalky beaches. There, he had his flowers and his isolation, and he had left me behind.

"I wanted Delphini to know me."

"I knew you," I muttered glumly, still nursing abandonment's sting. After the war, I had been exultant in victory, and then he had left me.

"Yes," he admitted freely. 

I mulled over his words, to the meaning obscured in them. I knew him. He had not known himself. How could he offer Delphini himself, when he did not know what the make of him was? 

"Your faith in me," he said brightly, and his smile was a crooked thing in earnest given to me. 

"Delphini has your smile." 

"She has your magic," he said, and in the gentleness in his voice I discerned another secret. She had _my_ magic. What I had given freely to heal, leaving myself a squib, had passed from daughter to father to daughter. 

In the house of the rising sun, I went to embrace this man with no name but what we had given him. 

"In hawthorn's time, the heart grows light," I promised us both, as he folded his arms about me and buried his head in my hair. 

In the house of the rising sun, we welcomed spring and May and May's flowers.

\---

So Delphini's was the wand of hawthorn and a horned serpent. 

"A healer's wand," Ollivander told me. "Perhaps she will go on to be the last salve for our people, when a silent illness walks, the likes of which we shall not see again, Mrs. Malfoy." 

"Prophecy, Mr. Ollivander?" I asked him, paying him the sum of eleven galleons. 

"An old man's speculation." 

\---

Bella took particular pleasure in wearing my crimson velvet boots everywhere. Her smugness was obscene and her twinkling eyes became her not a whit. 

* * *

**Stay Alive**  
2019 

"You are late," Draco announced, as we gathered for Martinmas. 

"I had to make a detour," Voldemort murmured, coming to kiss my cheek. 

"A detour?" I asked suspiciously. "It is unlike you to veer away from your itinerary." He had become a creature of habit in his retirement by the sea. 

"I shall tell you all about it over dinner," he promised, and hurried to the kitchens. 

I frowned. 

"Perhaps he stopped to shop for gifts," Draco suggested, waggling his eyebrows, having inherited Bella's shameless sense of theatrics. 

Bella burst into laughter as did Scorpius. Gifting was not in Voldemort's oeuvre, though he had been generous with the smuggling and distribution of Chocolate Frogs when Delphini and Scorpius had been children, despite my protests on behalf of their teeth. 

Delphini was in the North, having clamored to visit Hogwarts as part of the first delegation of hundred civilians who had been part of an exchange visit programme across the Wall, as a result of years of diplomatic efforts. Bella had been horrified by the notion. Voldemort had been asked to bar Delphini's ambition to visit, but he had never been one to forbid her anything once she had come of age. 

He and I knew the slippery slope of guardianship and agency. 

We sat down to dinner, to _Svartsoppa_ , our tradition of decades.

"Scorpius has started watching the Greg Ramsey show," Draco mentioned. "Mum did not approve of his walnut-pear breakfast buns."

Long ago, in olden times of war, Voldemort had surrendered himself to my guardianship, and we had greeted that morning together, breaking our fast with walnut-pear buns he had freshly baked. 

"It did not come together," I offered judgement. "There were nuts, there was bread, and there were pears. You might as well as have served them side-by-side, Scorpius." 

"The trick is in choosing ripe pears," Voldemort told Scorpius. 

"Delphini and I have watched you make this hundreds of times," Scorpius muttered.

"Oh, you are not in Delphini's league at all, Scorpius. You have never poisoned anyone with your attempts," I admitted, laughing. "She takes after Bella."

"Making toast on Fiendfyre is a culinary innovation that they ought to award me for," Bella opined. 

"Burning toast on Fiendfyre," I corrected her. 

The fire department was tired of dousing the emergencies in her kitchen, while simultaneously jumping away from her spluttering tirades whenever the hoses drenched her. 

\----

After the dinner, I went to Abraxas's study in their old quarters. It was my study now. It was also where Voldemort lingered whenever he spent the night in the manor. 

Voldemort was waiting for me. 

The gramophone was playing the Hamilton Musical that Delphini and Draco raved about. 

  
_"Outrun, Outrun_  
_Outlast, Outlast_  
_Hit 'em quick, get out fast_  
_Chick-a-plao!_  
_Stay alive 'til this horror show is past_  
_We're gonna fly a lot of flags half-mast_  
_Raise a glass"_

The music of our times was American. The culture of our times was American. As the hegemony of our erstwhile colony seeped into the fabric of our society's make, in politics, in law, in art and in music, I wondered when the Chinese influence would rise and replace it. 

Britain's time was past, in the Muggle world, as they stared at Brexit. Britain's time had been past, in the wizarding world, two decades ago, when we had ended a war by raising a magical Wall on the Anglo-Scottish line, dividing our country into two. 

So Delphini and Scorpius sang and danced to American music, and bludgeoned us with American memes and fashions. 

_"How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower_  
_Somehow defeat a global superpower?_  
_How do we emerge victorious from the quagmire?"_

Voldemort's magic was ragtag, a quagmire that keened to me desperately, drenched in horror and fear, suffused with knowing's weight.

"A virus has emerged in Wuhan, in China. It has surged through their wizarding districts. The affected are dying in droves."

"Wuhan is far away," I murmured, seeking to assuage him. 

"At least four hundred have travelled to Europe since they began tracking the arrivals and departures at the International Floo Station." 

"Have you informed St. Mungo's and the Ministry?" 

He nodded. Then he listed heavily against the desk, as a puppet with its strings cut. I rushed to him, frightened. His magic clamored to me, as claws and talons, shredding in panicked fear along the seams of me. 

"Whatever is it?" I asked, stricken, in pain, and yet willing myself lucid to behold him in his anguish. 

His hands came to hold me to him, clumsy and desperate, and for the first time in our acquaintance, he wept before me, nakedly afraid and concealing nothing. I held him close, and hushed him even as he fell into disconsolate sobbing, as a prophet that had seen rivers of blood and death ravage the places where we stood and loved. At wit's end, in agony, tearful, I searched for his wand, and when the wood of yew came to my hands, it was cut of new grief that had not come to pass. 

I brought the wand between us, and my magic fell topsy-turvy, long-dormant and nearly emptied, into the stricken folds of the roiling sea of him. It was scant, and scarcely enough, but a final hawthorn tore through the dystopian clatter of his frightened magic, as may's flower come to heal. 

"Narcissa!" He babbled, alarmed, as I fell exhausted against him. The calm of the last iota of my hawthorn's magic quelled him. "Foolish girl!"

"Tell me what it is that ails you," I demanded, as he sank to the floor, his shaking arms supporting my weight. 

"The poliovirus-" he shook his head, crying again. "Wizards have no defense against these diseases that cross from the Muggle world, Narcissa. Our immune system is our magic. When it weakens, even if we survive, there shall be no magic left in our bodies." 

Abraxas had lost his magic. He had been dying. And then Voldemort had bound them together, pouring his magic to sustain Abraxas from breath to breath. 

"That was long ago," I comforted him. "The Unspeakables and the Healers have studied cross-disciplinary methods across Muggle sciences and the Wizarding ways."

"The Muggles have no solution to this virus," he said, choking on sobs. "Delphini-"

Delphini was a Healer, the Chief Healer at St. Mungo's. I swallowed as I remembered Ollivander's prophecy, as I remembered Bella's strike of premonition about Asclepius. 

"Trust me," I entreated him, as he grieved before death had come to pass. "I shan't let anything happen to her." 

"Narcissa, my dearest Narcissa-" He cupped my face, and said solemnly in a voice hoarse from weeping. "Promise me that nothing shall happen to you."

The stark tenderness in his eyes when he beheld me revealed all. I clung to him with a sigh, and his magic was a wrap of resolute protection hewn of love. _Storge_ , Slughorn had called our rapport, the love that a man had for his family. 

" _Knight takes rook, but look_  
_We are out-gunned_  
_(What!)_  
_Out-manned_  
_(What!)_  
_Out-numbered, out-planned!_  
_(Boom, boom, boom; boom, boom)_  
_We gotta make an all-out stand"_

"Stay alive," Voldemort ordered me. 

"Stay alive," I told him in turn. 

" _Here comes the general!_  
_Rise up!"_

"Papa! Aunt Narcissa!" 

Delphini was alarmed as she came rushing to our side and knelt beside us. 

She had donned the green of her Healer's robes. 

"St. Mungo's has called," she stated the obvious. "A case of the Coronavirus has been admitted." 

Her hands, dainty and small, came to Voldemort's face to wipe away his tears. "It shall be all right, Papa." 

He said nothing, leaning involuntarily into her touch, but his magic, washed with foreboding, spoke for him. 

"It shall be all right," Delphini promised.

* * *

**Living in a Ghost Town**   
_2020_

"Dad and Mum are immunocompromised, after their years in Azkaban," Delphini told me, six feet away, wrapped in Bubblehead charms. "So you must ask Mum to stay put in their home!"

Bella believed that the pandemic was a hoax devised by Albus Dumbledore. Draco, thankfully, had stayed with me, cancelling his travels after Martinmas, after Voldemort's panicked return from Wuhan. So I was not alone in my manor. 

"The Cross-border Roundtable against Undesirable Pandemics has forwarded their recommendations to both the Ministries," Delphini continued. 

C.R.U.P. The Cross-border Roundtable against Undesirable Pandemics. Harry Potter and Susan Bones led the Northern delegation. The boy Delphini was sweet on, Nathaniel Rosier, led our delegation. 

C.R.U.P's headquarters were in old Gala, by the River Tweed, in the same chapel where once Albus Dumbledore and I had agreed to divide our country. 

Delphini had become fond of Harry Potter quickly, seeing in him many of the qualities she saw in her father, in irony's cruel twist. Harry Potter was fond of her too, finding in her innocence and determination to heal virtues he hearkened to. 

Harry had saved her, when a faction of Aurors had tried to kidnap and murder Bellatrix Lestrange's daughter. He had saved her and taken the Bone Marrow Dissolving Curse meant for her. 

For Delphini's sake, Voldemort and Harry had then come to truce, unspoken and sincere. 

The Wall was of little avail against a silent virus that knew not the pact of wizards. The Wall was of little avail against the flower children of our peace that did not know for whom the bells had tolled before their births. Neither Delphini nor the Coronavirus heeded the wars and prophecies of old. 

\---

Voldemort came to the manor once more, before the restrictions disallowed travel between households. 

I had been asleep. His knocking on my bedroom doors woke me. Sighing, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and went to him. 

We took our breakfast together. He had brought along fresh-baked pear buns encrusted with walnuts. There was tea. 

Halfway through the silent affair, he placed his wand by my saucer without ado. The wand knows its way, Abraxas had been fond of saying. The warmth of it clung heavy to my skin, though I had not touched it. 

"Your immune system is nonexistent."

I had no magic left. The only magic I could draw and use was his, and how many times had my hawthorn bloomed on his evergreen? 

"What will you do?"

"Trust me," he said, as of old, cocky and absolute in his unwavering confidence. 

I was transported to that young girl's room in the home of blues, where behind grilled bars she had wept for her mother, before a striking man had come to her, carrying chocolate frogs and poppies, and he had given her no name to call him by. 

And his wand of yew came to me. 

\----

"Harry is alone, in his little Aberdeen flat, and with the social distancing requirements he has nowhere to go. He struggles with melancholy!" Delphini said, pensive. "We finish our work at C.R.U.P. at two or three in the morning. He ends up sleeping in Gala, in the Auror barracks, because he is afraid to return home alone. The social distancing and the restrictions on meeting others who are not part of the household is taking a heavy toll on him, Aunt Narcissa."

_Ash, hawthorn, holly._

Sat at my desk of mahogany, which had once been Abraxas's, I watched Delphini worry for a man marked the Dark Lord's equal, on the iPad that Draco had set up for me. 

In the gardens, _Living in a Ghost Town_ played, on Scorpius's phone.

_"I'm a ghost, Livin' in a ghost town_  
_You can come look for me_  
_But I can't be found"_

The man had been a boy, carrying a scar to which had clung Voldemort's tattered magic. I had poured my magic to heal, to mend the evergreen that had been staved by holly's poisonous thorns. I had given the boy a chocolate frog and read to him the myth of Albus Dumbledore on the card.

"You look well, Aunt Cissy!" Delphini exclaimed then, peering at me through her tiny phone camera, from the janitorial closet in St. Mungo's, where she sneaked in to make her calls.

I could not cast magic with the wand, for I had no magic to cast, but I had not ever needed a panacea other than his magic's traces. 

"I miss you," Delphini whispered then, mournful and alone.

"It will be over soon," I promised her.

She shook her head to refute me, too clever for her own good. 

_"Livin' in this ghost town_  
_Ain't havin' any fun_  
_If I wanna party_  
_It's a party of one."_

* * *

**Straight to Hell**  
_2020_

Lucius contracted the virus. Wallis took him to the Dubh Linn Wizarding Hospice.

He survived a squib, with no magic left to him.

The toll of the Coronavirus in our Wizarding population was measured not merely in the deaths it caused; suicides had skyrocketed, the countries were stricken by a recession of disastrous consequences, and the survivors of the virus had no magic left to them.

\-----

"Are you worried for them?" Draco asked quietly, as we played chess together one evening. 

It was the two of us that night. Scorpius, stifled by the restrictions, had gone to camp by the brook. He would return soon, complaining about the cold and the mud. 

I was not worried for Bella and Rodolphus, despite Draco, Scorpius and Delphini fretting about them. Bella had an excellent knack for survival. With a daughter that she meant to live for, she would be careful. 

I was worried for Delphini, who was at the forefront of the pandemic response of our country. As the days passed into weeks, and then into months, as she saw them dying or surviving without their magic, as her healers collapsed in exhaustion and mental breakdown, as the governments on both sides of the Wall clamored to reopen the countries for the sake of economic recovery, she had been a thread fraying, thin and despairing. 

I was worried for Voldemort, whose magic clung to me in protection. If he had protected me, he would have protected Delphini. I feared his methods, as I walked upon the holy earth, where was buried a heart of gold, beneath the hawthorn, beneath the stars of Job's coffin in the constellation of Delphinus. 

"Harry is with him," Draco said gently, clasping my anxious fingers that were tapping to the frantic music Scorpius had left playing on the gramophone. 

_"Alright now_  
_Alright now_  
_Straight to hell tonight_  
_We're going straight to hell"_

Harry was with him. I did not think they would come to discord. Neither of them were given to acrimony, and even if they were, would keep their peace for Delphini's sake.

 _Ash, hawthorn, holly,_ Sibyl had prophesied to Abraxas. 

"I had not realized that you were on first-name terms with Harry Potter," I remarked to Draco. 

"We are at war with a virus. We are forty years old," Draco said mildly. "Hardly the place and time to worry over propriety." 

I said nothing to that. He had grown wise and strong, this boy of mine who Lucius had raised from babe to adolescent, before returning him home to English soil, to the manor where his grandfather had loved and died of a broken heart. 

"I had not thought that I might call a child my own," I confessed to him. 

He looked up from the chessboard, startled. Then his expression settled to calm once more, and he said quietly, "I know you did not marry Papa out of love."

"I love Lucius," I said bluntly. "It is merely not the love of a wife for her husband." 

"I know," he said gently, the very picture of Abraxas whenever he had interceded between the world and Voldemort who had not comprehended it. 

"You remind me of him," he said, then, and the affection in his voice cut to the heart. "You have always reminded me of him." 

It had come full-circle, and my son was gently endeavoring to shield me from a world that I little understood, shutaway in the manor that I had been for half a century. 

"I wanted you," I admitted. "I did not want sex. I did not want a husband. I wanted you." 

"I know," he said, and clasped my hands in his.

* * *

**A Hunter's Funeral**  
_2020_

The restrictions eased during Martinmas. 

Voldemort came to me, and I watched him toil over Svartsoppa. There was a quiet puzzlement to him, evident in magic and man both. We were in the middle of a pandemic that killed relentlessly and silently, heeding neither wall nor prayer, and yet he was content in our funereal world. 

"I can feel your contemplation," he complained lightly.

"Mine the mind that wins your wars," I reminded him, teasing. 

"You, my balm, of then and now." 

The sincerity in his voice cut. 

Abraxas had once told Voldemort the same words. Overwhelmed, forced to remain six feet away, wrapped in bubblehead charms, I wished I could embrace him. In the wake of my sorrow came his magic, curling close to me, warm and sun-baked, tinged with joy's crimson cloak. 

"What has you in high spirits?" I asked curiously. 

"Go on," he dared. 

I scowled. I could never resist a dare! He laughed as I brought the wand of yew to tug at where his magic hung light in mirth. It unspooled the silk of evergreen, fold after fold, until deep within I found a new secret held precious, wreathed in holly's red. 

"Ah!" I remarked.

"You are not surprised," he said, taken aback by my nonchalance. 

Had he expected condemnation? 

There had been a striking man, who, in an august gathering of mourners, had dared to brush his hand in perverse intimacy upon Abraxas's shoulder, and the audience had clucked and tutted and found him unworthy in his impropriety. Lucius and Bella had found his perversion harmless. I had never found it a perversion. 

Was it requited? It did not matter. If it were, if it weren't, he and I had each other, and our family, and our bonds of _storge_. 

He was watching me, curious, but unafraid of what my reaction might be, absolute in his trust. 

"I know you," I stated. 

"Yes," he agreed easily, and returned to the matter of the soup. 

\-----

We dined together, Scorpius and Draco and he and I, and on the gramophone played one of Draco's selections. 

"Mahler," he informed us. "Not that the lot of you heathens will know." 

"Tell us about it," I asked. He was the lone classical music aficionado among us.

"Mahler's first symphony. This is the third movement." He grinned and winked at me. "Your magic, Mum." 

He had spoken the truth. In the funereal expanse of the movement's opening, slow blossomed hope and resolve, as a hawthorn upon mourning's evergreen. 

"I know this music," Voldemort said quietly, as the violins bloomed bittersweet in sorrow's wake. "Hunter's funeral."

Draco stared at him, surprised. 

"I travelled in Germany," Voldemort explained. "In the 1950s. Mahler had been popular then in Bavaria. I heard this movement one night, played by a church orchestra in Marienplatz. One of the violinists told me of the tale that had inspired Mahler. It was the tale of a hunter's funeral, and sung of death; in irony, the mourners were the wild animals of the forest that had been spared their end by this turn of events, and they feted merrily as the procession went to the grave dug fresh."

"I had been lost to the rapture of this quixotic music, before being summoned by Abraxas to Druella's funeral." 

The mourners had gossiped and had no pity for my mother lying in her bier. They had stripped the earth of her poppies, and left not a trace of her. I had been a prisoner in my room, and afraid to weep for her lest my father's wrath be incited. 

Ours was ever this melody and counter-melody, in joy and in mourning, one twined to the other, resolute, wreathed in victory and grief.

From evergreen's expanse, the hawthorn drew strength and bloomed, then and now. 

* * *

**No son of mine**  
_2021_

"What shall you have?" 

Delphini grinned at me from across the chessboard, bright-eyed and ebullient in her victory. 

This girl, whom I had taught, from when she had been a child of three. 

Scorpius, who had been the only one to bet on her, mimed at her a high-five. They began singing to each other promptly the verses of Taylor Swift's _Cardigan_ , pandemic's music that they clung to when they could not cling to each other anymore. 

_"When you are young, they assume you know nothing_

_But I knew you_  
_Dancin' in your Levi's_  
_Drunk under a streetlight,_  
_I knew you"_

These children I had ended a war for. 

"What shall you give me, Aunt Narcissa?" 

In 1961, Voldemort had given me a Chocolate Frog Card.

In 2021, half a century later, Delphini stood before me, curly-haired and innocent, my victory manifest, and I knew it was time to yield her the card that had begun my journey. 

She had my magic. 

Now may she have the hope I had carried for six decades. 

I made a show of gifting the card to her, with a curtsey. Scorpius cheered her on as she lifted the card over her head as if it were a trophy. Then she cleared her throat and began reading affecting a plummy and pompous voice. 

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE  
CURRENTLY HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS  
Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark Wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and ten-pin bowling.

"I _hate_ chamber music!" Delphini remarked. "Gojira forever!" 

"I thought it was Lady Gaga forever," I said, entertained by her silliness and warmed by how she had obtained a reprieve of an evening from the pandemic's ravages. "Your favorites change at the drop of a hat."

They said that there would be a third wave. For now, there was respite. 

"I was born this way, Aunt Narcissa!" she explained. "Mum told me that I can be whatever I wish to be, whenever I wish to be!" 

"Your mum is Lady Gaga, confirmed," Scorpius announced. 

Pleased by the outrageous compliment, Bella conjured a wreath of laurel for Delphini and for Scorpius; I had not even known she remembered any innocuous spells. Wreathed, victorious, Delphini ran to the Edison gramophone Draco had won in a Sotheby's auction in New York. 

_A horse with no name_ began playing. 

Scorpius and Delphini were head-banging, whooping and merry, and Bella joined them in their antics, shamelessly youthful as she was ever. 

I walked to where Voldemort stood watching them. Unbearable lightness seized me whole when he offered me his hand to dance. 

_"I've been through the desert, on a horse with no name,_  
_It felt good to be out of the rain."_

We were out of the rain. 

"Here we are," I told him happily, stepping with him into a waltz. 

"How does your victory taste?" he asked, making no attempt to conceal the awed acknowledgement in his gaze as he beheld me.

Delphini had won this game, but she was my victory. Six decades, and there we were, out of the rain. 

"The victory of a promise kept," I told Voldemort, as we danced in my gardens, amidst blooms of hawthorns, shielded from late summer's rain by his magic. Daring some, daring all, I placed my right hand over his breast, where through the summer's flax he wore I felt the beat of his life. 

"My dearest Narcissa," he said softly.

I was the heir to a cripple that had loved a madman, the protege chosen neither by blood nor by writ will.

"If you say you are indebted, I shall be cross," I told him frankly. 

The quirk of his mouth was a warm, crooked thing, unstudied and artless. Delphini had inherited his smile. 

We were family, he and I; Abraxas had chosen us and loved us and given us all that was his. 

"You have won your war," Voldemort said quietly, brushing a clumsy kiss to my brow. "This lone huntress, Artemis, who hath yoked the brood of savage lions."

The reverence in his tone was weighed down by the warmth of affection, and his magic mantled me in filial white and gold, spun of mourning's grace that had made way for brighter loves, brighter than the sun. 

They were playing _No Son of Mine_ , by the Foo Fighters, Scorpius's favorite song of the new year.

_"Things were never easy for me_  
_Peace of mind was hard to find_  
_And I needed a place where I could hide_  
_Somewhere I could call mine"_

"In my home, by my hearth, you have a place," Voldemort repeated my words of so long ago, when I had been a young girl of sixteen. 

I caught his hands in mine, and let my magic seek his, and it dotted upon his evergreen a canopy of delphinium. 

"You have learned," he remarked, drawing my magic further into his, guiding me along the conduits of mingling. The delicate, deliberated control he employed was as an artist's brush. 

He had taught me boldness. I had taught him patience. 

"You have learned," I told him.

He winked at me. 

Laughing, I shifted my hands to his shoulders. 

Lucius was speaking softly to his Wallis, as he pointed out to her this or that landmark on the old Malfoy estates that had passed from his father to me. 

Bella was conducting Delphini and Scorpius as they covered the night skies with fireworks that took the shape of fantastical beasts with wings and horns and tails and many eyes that crossed deserts and oceans of their conjuring. 

The ash trees of the arbor rustled with our songs, and beneath their dark awning rose a sea of delphinium, as Voldemort seamlessly made my magic manifest. 

"Stop that!" Bella called out to me, as flowers bloomed beneath her booted feet. "You are detracting from our fireworks!" 

"Mine the land, mine the flowers!" I called back. 

"You are a wretched terror!" she shouted, laughing, lovely in the arcing light of the fireworks that the children splashed in the hastening dark. 

_"They say that time is a healer_  
_And now my wounds are not the same_  
_But I rang that bell with my heart in my mouth_  
_I had to hear what he'd say."_

Scorpius and Delphini were belting out the lyrics, discordant and tuneless and happy, yelling out the son's lament of a father that had scorned him.

"I went to him once," Voldemort said quietly. "He was cruel. I had wanted-" He shook his head. "I came back here. I had Abraxas. Then there was you."

The softness of mourning when he spoke Abraxas's name was tinged by the quiet joy of living, marked upon the evergreen as holly's red. So this was time's healing. So this was Sibyl's prophecy to Abraxas come true. So this was where the weary rivers had found the sea. 

"You brought me here," I murmured. He and I had been children unwanted by their fathers, and we had found each other again and again, in sacrifice's strait. "I waited for you here. And from our yesterdays, this day we wrought."

He nodded, steadying the magic of the earth so that I might have what I wished for. That it had come to this, to how we could read each other with mere glance. His was the magic upon which mine had learned to bloom. 

So I went to my sister, to take her hands in mine. Of equal heart, she joined her magic to mine, and the delphinium were joined by the poppies of our mother's garden, as we wound into one the old and the new of us. Delphini rushed to us, and we formed a circle knitting our hands with this child that was our grace, and hawthorns blossomed white, pure in their joy.

We painted the flowers of our family, in the colors of our _storge_ , from our foundling's magic, upon this land where a heart of gold was buried, beneath the skies where the stars of Delphinus beamed bright upon my victory.

"What an eldritch sight! It gives me heart that the pandemic too shall pass," Delphini exclaimed, face gleaming in the light of the fireworks, eyes wet with fierce emotion as she watched our blooms rise to greet the night. 

The pandemic, too, would pass, even if we found we could not see the end of it right then. 

_"I've been through the desert, on a horse with no name,_  
_It felt good to be out of the rain."_

Eldritcher things had come to be, in this house of the rising sun.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Our musical references: [**Leitmotifs, Themes, and Songs of Pandemic**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586945)


End file.
